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LYNN HAROLD 
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The Quest for Wonder 

AND 

OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL AND 
THEOLOGICAL STUDIES 



BY 

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 

Professor of Historical Theology in 
Garrett Biblical Institute 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1915. by 
LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 



APR -6 1915 

©CI,a;J98233 



*7 



TO MY FRIEND 

DR. HENRY M. WILSON 

A SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN 

OF THE OLD SCHOOL 

THIS VOLUME IS 

AFFECTIONATELY 

INSCRIBED 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

A Word to the Reader 9 

I. The Quest for Wonder 11 

II. The Preacher as a Student of Phi- 
losophy 43 

III. Bergson, as Seen from a Preacher's 

Study 73 

IV. The Religion of a Scientific Man. 101 
V. The New Orthodoxy 129 

VI. BUSHNELL AND "ThE ViCARIOUS SAC- 
RIFICE" 155' 

VII. Robert William Dale and His The- 
ology, W^iTH Special Considera- 
tion OF His Theory of the Atone- 
ment 187 

VIII. The Theological Situation Regard- 
ing THE Atonement 217 

IX. The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl 247 
X. The Eschatology of the Book of 

Revelation 275 



A WORD TO THE READER 

After about sixteen years in the pastor- 
ate the author of these studies finds himself 
entering upon the work of a theological 
professor. He has published much in the 
periodicals of his church and in book form 
during this time, and those interested are 
not imfamiliar with his general position on 
philosophical and theological matters. The 
volume, The Theology of a Preacher, in 
particular sets forth in an informal and 
untechnical way his attitude toward the 
significant matters in the realm of Christian 
doctrine. 

The present, however, seems an appro- 
priate time for the publication of a number 
of studies which express in a somewhat 
formal way the results of investigation and 
grapple and thought regarding the funda- 
mental problems which confront the Chris- 
tian thinker. The separate discussions are 
published in the form in which they were 
written at different periods, and this will 
account for some repetition and for some 

9 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

difference in mental atmosphere. Although 
the studies touch upon a variety of themes, 
they reflect one general point of view and 
one set of principles applied to numerous 
problems. Thanks are due to the publishers 
of the Methodist Review, the Methodist 
Quarterly Review, and the Bible Magazine 
for permission to reprint material which has 
appeared in these periodicals. 

Lynn PIarold Hough. 
Evanston, Illinois. 



10 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 



CHAPTER I 

THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

A SERIOUS and thoughtful man once had 
a singular dream. He dreamed that a race 
of men arose gifted with a strange power 
to experiment with the fundamental char- 
acteristics of the natural world. They could 
change the qualities of the soil. They could 
rearrange the laws of physics and chemistry. 
They could separate things which have al- 
ways been united and unite things which 
have always been separated. They could 
take qualities from the thing to which they 
have always belonged and give them to other 
things. Nothing was beyond the reach of 
their manipulations. 

For a time this powerful race greatly en- 
joyed its unusual activities; but by and by 
it became evident that the new race was 
spoiling the world. The soil was tampered 
with until its fertility was affected. Rays 
of light were so treated that the illuminating 
gnd warming power greatly decreased. At 

13 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

last a new world was produced in which 
everything was haphazard. Men gradually 
adjusted themselves to a dwarfed and im- 
poverished life. The race lost its power to 
experiment with nature and settled down to 
live in a dull, gray, hardly tolerable world, 
the product of its own mistaken energy. 

Fortunately, such fundamental tamper- 
ing with nature has never been within the 
reach of human power, though John Ruskin 
would probably have said that many a great 
city in its loathsome conditions represents 
very much this sort of thing. But what is 
impossible physically is quite possible intel- 
lectually. We live in the physical world 
God has made. We live in the intellectual 
world men have made. 

Now, the actual meaning of human life 
as a personal experience is very largely 
determined by the mental outlook of the man 
who is going through the experience. What 
he believes, what he hopes, what he fears, 
what he unconsciously assumes — the whole 
range of his thoughts about life — make up 
the vital part of his world. The physical 
world is only a background, and for the 

14 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

purposes of the deepest meaning of joy and 
sorrow, hope and fear, often a very inci- 
dental background of the personal life. 

This world of the mind men make and 
destroy and remake. They can manipulate 
it in all sorts of ways. They can make it 
good or bad, beautiful or ugly, glad or miser- 
able. And this is the world of destiny into 
which all of us are born. Superstition has 
filled air and earth with evil spirits. The 
fact that they had no existence save in the 
minds of those who believed in them, did not 
lessen the tragedy of believing in a devil- 
haunted world. Every religion had pro- 
vided a mental environment for its wor- 
shipers. And thus many a religion has 
cramped and destroyed some of the fairest 
things of life. 

Civihzation is another name for the 
mental environment humanity creates as it 
moves onward for succeeding generations. 
You are born into its sanctions. They are 
offered to you as a suit of clothing you must 
wear if you are to have social relations with 
the men of your time. Of course you may 
refuse the suit of clothing. But you will 

15 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

become an outcast if you do. And we must 
frankly confess that the suit is not always 
made of the best material, nor is it always 
a good fit. The scholars and the philoso- 
phers and the great leaders have used their 
energies modifying the mental environment 
of the race, and often they have taken 
oxygen out of the mental atmosphere and 
have made it very difficult to breathe. There 
has not always been an adequate realization 
on the part of the intellectual leaders of the 
race of the fact that it is a very responsible 
thing to provide mental food for men. 

To be sure, vast and wonderful are the 
achievements of the himian mind. Splendid 
is the tale of human progress. But it is by 
no means a one-sided story, and the man 
who would make the most out of life as a 
personal experience must learn to be a critic 
as well as a disciple. He must enlist in the 
most subtle warfare in the world, the 
struggle for an intellectual background 
which constantly enlarges life and never 
causes it to shrink. The point of view which 
saps the vitality from existence has no right 
in the world, and the slavery to a point of 

16 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

view which dwarfs humanity is the most 
intolerable slavery on the planet. 

In the light of these facts we want to 
make a survey of certain intellectual tenden- 
cies which have moved very deeply in the 
life of men. We want to see their strength 
and their weakness, their tragedy and their 
hope, and to reach some practical conclu- 
sions which a careful and analytical inspec- 
tion will suggest. 

The two fundamental characteristics of 
the mind are the desire for stability and the 
desire for wonder. To put it in another 
way, they are the desire for unity and the 
desire for diversity. 

The Greeks found the two characteristics 
coming to clenched antagonism when the 
substance of the Eleatics faced the moving 
procession of Heraclitus. Whenever men 
become really reflective one of these desires 
is likely to become paramount. The desire 
for stability with one thinker casts out the 
desire for wonder. In another the desire 
for a world full of initiative and surprise 
and movement casts out the desire for a close 
and coherent and unified view of life. 
17 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 



There have been periods when men's view 
of hfe and the world has made full room 
for wonder and surprise, but has sadly 
lacked in making any provision for the in- 
tellectual stability of the world. 

This is true especially of primitive and 
barbarous peoples. And this accounts for 
that naive and beautiful poetry which is so 
characteristic of them. The Indian on the 
plain, the Xegro in his cabin, the backward 
races of the world everywhere, live in a world 
with amazing and beautiful and torturing 
possibilities of surprise. The folklore stories 
of the world, the myths fresh from the child- 
like heart of humanity; the religions of 
nature with their astonishing reflection of 
the quality of primitive human experience 
and desire — all these belong to the unreflec- 
tive, believing, wonder ages of the world and 
the stages of human experience which cor- 
respond to them. At their best they repre- 
sent the fine flower of the superstition of 
the world; at their worst they represent a 
brutal and lawless and terrible expression 

18 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of the most degraded and wildest things in 
human life. Hawthorne's Donatello in The 
Marble Faun lived in this world of nature's 
marvel and bewildering surprise until the 
shock of the awakening and disillusionment 
came. 

The ethnic rehgions had made it a point 
to preserve the reign of wonder. Often they 
have done it partly by means of the grossest 
and most vicious types of superstition. The 
wonder-world of the Arabian Nights is an 
illustration of what can be done when 
imagination is allowed to take long flights. 
If you do not like it, you can call it a gam- 
bler's world. But at least it is a world where 
lethargy is impossible. You are not likely 
to go to sleep or be bored in any of its scenes. 
Something is always going to happen, and 
you never know quite what it is. But not 
only Mohammedanism, but practically every 
ethnic faith has its throne of wonder sur- 
rounded by rainbow colors of astonishment 
and surprise. 

One of the distinguishing characteristics 
of Roman Catholicism has been the entire 
preservation of the reign of wonder. To dip 

19 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

into the life of a Roman Catholic saint is 
like suddenly dropping into another world 
where no one has ever heard of the reign 
of law. The marvelous lures and beckons 
and you live in a country where all the charm 
of fairyland is called into play as an asset 
of religion. 

The limitations and inadequacies of all 
this kind of interpretation of life are clearly 
visible to the careful thinker. Wonder is 
preserved at the expense of rationality. Sur- 
prise and glamour and charm and the beat- 
ing of fairy wings are secured at the expense 
of an ordered and coherent and lawful uni- 
verse. This kind of a paradise of wonder 
is a paradise of the ignorant. Knowledge 
drives away the spirits and the fairies and 
the gnomes. You must pay for these, the 
experiences of childlike belief in the myths 
of many an ethnic religion, by remaining in 
some degree a barbarian at heart. 

Then the reign of wonder in these realms 
is an unethical thing. A brilHant theolo- 
gian once made an observation to the effect 
that whenever you have a profound belief 
in the supernatural without a deep and com- 

20 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

manding ethical sense you have superstition. 
In the primitive peoples and religions and 
the survivals of the primitive wonder- feeling 
you have exactly that situation. And with 
all the subtle charm of many a bit of folk- 
lore and legend, the other side of the story 
reveals a capricious, lawless, undependable 
universe. You pay for your fairies by mak- 
ing room for demons. You pay for your 
endless miracles by accepting a universe 
which has no firmly grounded unity and 
consistency and stability. You pay for your 
glad surprises by the possibility of very 
deadly surprises. There is nothing you can 
depend on, and life is reduced in one way or 
another to a matter of magic and incanta- 
tion. The wildly and terribly dramatic 
features triumph at last. The leering devils 
drive away the fairies, and one day you 
awake to find your religion a devil-worship. 
Thus it has happened in more than one 
ethnic cult. 

II 

There have been periods where men's 
view of life was based on the unity and co- 
herency of the universe, when there was a 

21 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

firm intellectual stability in the interpreta- 
tion of the world, but where the sense of 
wonder was all the while being driven 
farther and farther away. It is a great 
relief to turn from the futilities and absurdi- 
ties of barbarism to the careful use of the 
inductive method of reasoning and the rise 
of modern science. At every stage of the 
process some hoary superstition has van- 
ished. A thousand terrible and torturing 
phantoms have been driven away as the 
triumphant armies of science have moved 
forward. One realm after another has been 
invaded. Its materials have been analyzed 
and classified. All has been reduced to sub- 
serviency to the reign of law. Cause and 
effect have become the regal words of the 
language, and the widening ranges of the 
application of great scientific principles have 
been sources of delight to the investigator 
and to the man who was building large 
philosophic generalizations on the returns of 
science as they come in. 

Now, it is easy to see that the superstitious 
religions of the world created an artificial 
and unreal universe. They tampered with 
22 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

men's thoughts about Hfe, and in many cases 
caused them to inhabit a world made ter- 
rible and unhappy by thoughts which were 
the product of human imagination. The 
mental environment of the ethnic religions 
is a human creation, and to a large degree 
a creation having no relation to the reality 
of things. All this is quickly conceded. 
But now we come to another matter, 
equally true, and yet not nearly so easy to 
see or appreciate. When the reign of law 
was substituted for the reign of wonder, 
and modern science began to be turned into 
scientific philosophy, once more there began 
the creation of an artificial mental environ- 
ment. The synthetic philosophy is as far 
from the reality of human experience as 
would be a philosophy attempting to include 
as real all the features of Arabian Nights. 
The scientific explanation of the universe 
has been so busy with things and forces that 
it has never faced the meaning of person- 
ality. It has been so busy with physical 
coherency and uniformity that it has never 
understood that freedom and initiative and 
movement which belong to the personal 
23 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

mental life. Barbarism made the mistake 
of attempting to explain all impersonal 
things in the immediate terms of personality. 
Much scientific philosophy has made the 
mistake of trying to explain personal ex- 
perience in impersonal terms. 

To follow the logic of the scientific ap- 
praisal when it leaves its proper task of 
being bookkeeper to catalogue physical 
uniformities, and puts out its sign as a 
master in philosophy, is one of the most dis- 
appointing things in all the world. 

The rise of modern science, to be sure, is 
like a sudden sunrise. The victories over 
hoary superstition are good to witness. 
Endless vistas spread out before us. New 
worlds lie all about us ready for the con- 
queror. This was the situation in the middle 
of the nineteenth century and for some time 
after. Then there came a strange change. 
A dull lethargy began to settle down upon 
the world. Doors were closing with a bang. 
Vistas which had seemed infinite contracted 
and disappeared. The spring and enthusi- 
asm of the youth of modern science were 
transformed into a premature old age. The 

24 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

warmth and brightness of Hf e began to wane. 
The new world, it began to appear, was not 
a world in which men could be happy. 
Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gipsy is a fair 
expression of the new mood. The wisest 
man takes his seat dejectedly upon the intel- 
lectual throne. 

What has happened? Why this dullness, 
these heavy eyes, this lethargy which seems 
likely to become despair ? The answer is that 
the men who by too hasty generalizations 
were transforming science into philosophy 
had tampered with the intellectual life of 
the world. They had built a system smaller 
than life. They offered a stone when per- 
sonality must have bread — and this quite 
literally — for they were in fact attempting 
to reduce the organic to the terms of the in- 
organic. Men woke up to find that they 
lived in a world from which initiative and 
movement and freedom were gone. The 
wonder of the world had been cast out for 
the sake of uniformity. Freshness and 
surprise had been trodden under the foot 
of stability. The trouble with barbarism 
is that under its sanction anything can 
25 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

happen. The trouble with the scientific 
appraisals of which we are speaking is that 
under these sanctions nothing in a personal 
sense can happen at all. 

This situation accounts for the wide hear- 
ing of the men who are crying out, "Back to 
the mediaeval.'* Celtic romance, Gilbert 
Chesterton's brilliant paradoxes, all the cry 
for a return to fairyland — these are the in- 
evitable reaction from an interpretation of 
life which reduces the universe to a system 
of pigeonholes — everything fastened so 
tightly that not even a worm could crawl 
from one hole to another. How new and 
different the intellectual situation is, is sug- 
gested by the fact that Newman went to 
Rome to find intellectual rest. Gilbert 
Chesterton finds the world of modern science 
so deadly dull and commonplace that he 
seems in a fair way to go to Rome to find 
excitement. 

A new appeal of the Roman Catholic 
Church, of which farsighted ecclesiastics 
will not be slow to take advantage, is this 
preserving in a scientific age of an emphasis 
on that wonder of the world of which the 

26 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

human heart will not be robbed. The nine- 
teenth century saw the maturity of a system 
of reducing all life to the mechanical on the 
side of materialism, which robbed the world 
of freedom and stir and wonder. So much 
was the net result at this point of the syn- 
thetic philosophy. It saw the maturity of 
an intellectual interpretation which reduced 
life to a mental mechanism and so destroyed 
freedom and initiative and wonder. This 
was the Hegelian outcome. In each case 
logic attempted to shut the door in the 
face of life. It would be the supreme 
delight of Rome if Protestantism should 
so completely ally itself with these forces 
of mechanical thought, or at least so im- 
bibe their atmosphere, as to lose its sense 
of wonder entirely. A rationalistic Prot- 
estantism is the greatest hope of Rome, for, 
with all its faults, Rome has preserved the 
sense of freedom and movement and wonder 
in the world. 

If it is true, on the one hand, that bar- 
barism creates a false and deadly mental 
environment because it preserves wonder at 
the expense of stability, it is true, on the 
27 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

other, that much modern thinking has 
created a false and deadly mental environ- 
ment by preserving stability at the expense 
of wonder. A universe of mere mechanical 
interactions is an impossible universe for a 
wholesome growing human life. 

Ill 

In this whole situation we can appreciate 
the quest for wonder as a fundamental char- 
acteristic of present-day life and thought. 
Very often it is a partly subconscious quest. 
Men are dull and restless. They feel 
cramped and hedged in. There is something 
suffocating about their mental atmosphere. 
Instinctively they begin to fight for room 
and space to breathe and for a larger life. 
Some men, in sheer despair, stop thinking 
and fall into physical indulgence. Here at 
least they find a counterfeit of that wonder 
their souls desire. If they cannot have a 
world of spiritual glow and freshness, they 
will at least have a world of physical sensa- 
tion. To nobler spirits, of course, such an 
alternative is impossible. They live in moral 
loyalty to ideals which, so far as they can see, 

28 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

have no foundation in the system of things. 
They reahze as they think more clearly and 
accurately that their view of life logically 
pronounces the death warrant of personal 
freedom and power of decision, of that per- 
sonal initiative in God or man which makes 
wonder and surprise and freshness of life 
possible. They see at last that their point 
of view is incompatible with the validity of 
morals and religion. Their deepest intui- 
tions are in direct antagonism with what 
they conceive to be the facts of life. Such 
a man as Arthur Hugh Clough felt the 
torturing pang of this dilemma, and to many 
a man of science whose thinking has moved 
along these lines the whole experience has 
been a personal tragedy. 

But such a state of disillusionment de- 
veloping into despair could not be the last 
word. The quest for wonder was bound to 
become more than a subconscious movement. 
Life, like a great river, was sure to rise and 
overflow the embankments of cold, hard 
logic. As a matter of fact this has already 
happened. The pragmatists in England and 
America are prophets of an interpretation 
29 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of life where there is room for wonder, where 
in a fresh and vital way things can really 
happen. The pragmatists are sometimes 
superficial, and sometimes they seem to treat 
some facts in a cavalier fashion, and some- 
times they seem to mistake a method for a 
philosophy. But this is to be said for them : 
they have seen that life itself is more com- 
manding than our thoughts about life. They 
have seen that our experience is more mas- 
terful than the logical systems by means of 
which we try to interpret it. They have 
declared in no uncertain tone that life itself 
has the right of way. And this declaration 
brings in again the wonder and the surprise 
of the world. 

Henri Bergson, whose brilliant work at 
the College de France is known to all the 
world, is another prophet of the reaction 
from the mechanical view of life. The Crea- 
tive Evolution is a sort of philosophers' 
Magna Charta of the wonder of the world. 
Freedom, vital movement, the full recogni- 
tion of the place of the unexpected; the 
glow, the freshness, the stimulus of living 
in a world where everything has not hap- 

30 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

pened, and where the great unknown future 
beckons — all of this is preserved and de- 
fended in masterful fashion in Professor 
Bergson's work, by an intellect of almost 
uncanny acuteness. 

Professor Rudolf Eucken, at Jena, is 
another prophet of the reaction from the 
reign of mechanics in human thought. Not 
so brilliant as Professor Bergson, he has 
more spiritual depth, more richness of inner 
life, more feeling for the deep moral and 
spiritual meanings of experience. He has 
waged a long battle for a universe fit to be 
a dwelhng place for a man with a soul. 
There is a vein of rich mysticism in his think- 
ing, and the deep spiritual currents of ex- 
perience are as real to him as any facts of 
hfe. In the name of the spiritual life, with 
its wonder and surprise and creative energy, 
he repudiates the reduction of the inner life 
of man to a subtle kind of chemistry. With 
him too life, the highest, most palpitating, 
most regally free life, has the right of way. 

The whole pluralistic movement is a re- 
action from the unity of a universe which 
secures stability at the expense of movement 
31 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

and banishes the play of Hving and free 
energy from the life of the world. It would 
rather rest with unsolved mental problems 
than sacrifice the richness of life. It would 
be daring enough to accept a sort of phil- 
osophic polytheism rather than a lifeless 
universe which made real movement im- 
possible. 

All of these aspects of present-day think- 
ing demonstrate that the nineteenth centmy 
has actually passed and that we live in a new 
world. There is much that is topsy-tur\y 
about it all. Sometimes the quest for 
wonder seems the quest of an infant with no 
language but a cry. This infant, however, 
has good, strong lungs and it cries very 
lustily. The whole situation reveals a mass 
of seething forces very vital, very full of 
energy, many of them untamed but all zest- 
ful and eager and moving violentl3\ One 
feels that it is good to be alive in such an 
age. 

To be sure, such a period has its dangers. 

The passion for wonder, for richness of life, 

for movement may be a destroying as well 

as a constructive force. Elements in the 

32 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

Nietzschean view of life may work to tear 
down ancient sanctions of unspeakable 
value to the race. Panting for freedom, we 
may get too much freedom. Fighting for 
liberty, we may degenerate into license. 
The man who would revise the Ten Com- 
mandments and repudiate the sanctities of 
the home is the particularly dangerous devil 
of the new movement. The solid foundations 
of things may be tampered with b}^ enthusi- 
astic amateurs in the name of progressive 
thinking, and from the mechanical uniform- 
ity of the nineteenth century we may pass 
into a wild lawlessness in the twentieth. The 
syndicalist represents a spirit which does 
not promise good to the practical industrial 
life, and the brothers of the syndicalist are 
ready to speak in many avenues of modern 
activity. The danger is that from one ex- 
treme of the pendulmn we will swing to the 
other. 

IV 

The goal of our discussion is now in sight 

and has doubtless already become clear to 

the thoughtful reader. Stability without 

wonder gives us a dead and mechanical 

33 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

universe. Wonder without stability gives 
us a universe undependable, incoherent, at 
last chaotic. Somehow these two elements 
must be so combined that unity and move- 
ment, stability and wonder, simplicity and 
diversity are united in our view of life. In 
a larger and more adequate way the task of 
the old Greek philosophers of reconciliation 
is ours. 

We may make a few suggestions as to the 
lines along which this philosophy of united 
stability and wonder must move. 

1. It must begin with personality and not 
with things or forces. All the experience 
of which we know anything at first-hand is 
personal, and from this vantage ground we 
must survey the world. Such a survey will 
save us from all sorts of intellectual and 
practical confusions. It will assmne free- 
dom, initiative, and the power of personal 
choice and purpose. It will not attempt to 
make a recipe for freedom or to construct a 
formula for personal choice. It will mider- 
stand that these things are beyond the reach 
of formulas, and that whenever a man tries 
to make a formula for personal activities he 

34 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

simply proves that he does not understand 
the problem. It is as if he would insist on 
knowing the color of one of Beethoven's 
sonatas, or the sound of one of Turner's 
paintings. He understands that personality 
as a matter of free movement in rational 
choice is not a conclusion but a necessary 
assumption. It is the major premise of the 
validity of experience. He does not try to 
go behind this necessary assmnption. He 
sees that the inevitable result would be 
reasoning in a circle. Critical insight may 
discover what are life's necessary assump- 
tions, but it cannot demonstrate them by 
formal logic. The task of philosophy is to 
see what tools must be used in hfe's activities 
and then to polish them. There will be many 
mysteries, but the tools can be made very 
sharp and effective. 

2. It will be seen that all the impersonal 
activities and energies must be referred at 
last to a personal source, or they lose all 
genuine meaning. A force or a law is only 
a figure of speech unless it is a description 
of a person acting. And you cannot explain 
anything by an empty abstraction. The 
35 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

whole range of uniformities in the universe 
must be referred at last to a conscious per- 
sonal intelligence or they will hang empty 
in the air. This insight lifts the thinker 
from the thought of human personality, 
with which he began, to the thought of divine 
personality. He sees that the only way to 
give any definite meaning to an ultimate 
force is by seeing that it is the activity of 
an ultimate Person. 

3. This final commanding personality is 
not a caretaker in the palace of the universe. 
He is not a furtive servant in his own world. 
He is not the slave of the system of things. 
He is an imperial master and moves right 
royally through the world. He is the highest 
expression of freedom. He is freedom 
divinely alive. At this point the Calvinists 
had noble insight. They did not understand 
the freedom of man, but they did under- 
stand the freedom of God. They knew that 
an uncoerced Deity on the throne of his 
own freedom was the necessary background 
for all true meaning to life. This concep- 
tion of divine freedom and personality and 
of natural law as just a name for the way 

3G 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

in which a free person acts, secures for all 
time the wonder and movement and sur- 
prise which must be preserved in our thought 
and experience of life. If the ultimate fact 
is a free personal God, rigid mechanics are 
forever driven from the throne of the world. 
We are saved from the tragedy of a mental 
mechanism like Hegelianism. We are saved 
from the tragedy of a material mechanism 
like the synthetic philosophy. We live in 
a world where the freshness and the joy 
and the stimulus which only freedom at the 
heart of things can give are forever assured. 
A personal God lordly in liberty is the 
security of the wonder of the world. 

This freedom, however, is an ethical free- 
dom. It is always mastered and dominated 
by the character of God. It is not the 
freedom of a superape. It is the freedom 
of a righteous and holy Deity. This is the 
basis of the uniformity of nature. God does 
not play tricks with his world. His imi- 
verse is orderly because he is an orderly 
God. The stability of the whole vast system 
of things rests at last, not in any rigid or 
mechanical necessity, but on the character 
37 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of the Almighty. At this point natural 
science and ethics meet and science is trans- 
figured. The nineteenth century tried to 
bring ethics down into the categories of 
natural science. The twentieth is to lift 
natural science into the categories of ethics. 
Thus the very conception of a free personal 
God which secures the wonder of the world 
because of his character as a righteous and 
holy Deity also secures the stability of the 
universe. Unity and diversity have met to- 
gether. Monism and Pluralism have kissed 
each other. 

The character of God also secures wonder, 
while at the same time repudiating super- 
stition. It is always an ethical wonder which 
is preserved. Thus with one stroke the 
crass and wild imaginations of the ethnic 
faiths and all the puerilities of Roman Cath- 
olic superstition are destroyed. Rome has 
paid a dreadful price for wonder by admit- 
ting superstition. The view we are analyzing 
admits movement, freedom, and wonder 
made ethical in such a fashion that the primi- 
tive gladness is preserved in the midst of 
modern knowledge, the childlike surprise is 
38 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

preserved in the intellectual life which is the 
highest product of civilization. 



In conclusion some observations must be 
made about the relation of the Christian 
religion to these fundamental matters. 
Right on the face of our discussion it is 
clear that the God who is the synthesis of 
the two movements we have been discussing, 
who holds secure the unity and diversity, 
the stability and the wonder of the world, 
would have just the characteristics of the 
Deity whom Christians worship. Christi- 
anity is a religion which unites stability and 
ethical wonder in the interpretation of life. 

To be sure, Christian thinkers have not 
always been conscious of the strategy of 
their position. But all the while the per- 
sonal holy God revealed in the life of which 
the Old and New Testaments are the literary 
record, was the possessor of the character- 
istics capable of being made a solvent in 
respect of this most difficult problem of 
philosophy and life. And in a practical way 
Christianity has preserved stability and 
39 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

wonder in many an age when its own 
thinkers were not fully conscious of what 
was going on. 

The philosophy to which our deepest 
needs will drive us is, then, in a very pro- 
found sense a Christian philosophy. What 
the Christian religion brings as a revelation, 
philosophy will translate into an interpreta- 
tion of life. 

But more than this. What philosophy 
can state as a matter of principles, Christi- 
anity translates into deeds. The incarnation 
of the Son of God, and his human life divine, 
are the very expression in concrete activity 
of that for which we have been contending. 
The mighty deed of sin-bearing, by which 
the Son of God in profound spiritual fashion 
took upon himself the burden of the sin of 
the world, is the very crystallization into 
one act of infinite significance, of that moral 
wonder and moral stability which are funda- 
mental in God and in his ruling of the world, 
and must be made fundamental in the life 
of man. In all ages the facts of the 
Christian religion have been enriching the 
thought, redeeming, transforming, and en- 

40 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

larging the life of men, because Christianity 
is a rehgion of stabihty as complete and sure 
as the character of God, of wonder and 
surprise as amazing as his infinite freedom 
and his exhaustless love. Deeds speak more 
loudly than intellectual interpretation can 
ever speak. Bethlehem and Calvary are the 
security of the stability and the wonder of 
the world. 



41 



THE PREACHER AS A STUDENT 
OF PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER II 

THE PREACHER AS A STUDENT OF 
PHILOSOPHY 

The fascination of many human contacts 
may rob the preacher of a philosophy. He 
has learned that life has no thrill like the 
meeting of soul with soul. To go through 
the world sensing the inner quality of men's 
struggle and pain and fear and bringing to 
them the gift of understanding sympathy 
and divine hope has become an experience 
of constant richness and wonder. It is true, 
as Browning says, that it is "an awkward 
thing to play with souls," but to deal at 
first-hand with palpitating human lives is 
so strangely compelling an experience that 
everything else is likely to seem common- 
place when compared with it. When human 
life and sin and salvation are constantly un- 
folding themselves before a man's surprised 
and wondering eyes, in dramas of which he 
is the one intimate spectator, this kind of 
experience is likely to become the engrossing 

45 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

matter of his life. In all this he may have 
merely an artistic and dilettante interest; 
even a preacher may be caught by this snare. 
But if he comes to it with a consuming pas- 
sion for souls and a commanding sense of 
God in his own life, the whole experience 
will be lifted into high moral and spiritual 
quality. The preacher will discover that this 
is what it means to be a pastor, and being 
this kind of pastor makes him a true 
preacher and gives to him his most powerful 
and effective sermons. Such a man is often 
tempted to be impatient with his study. Its 
lamps seem dull and cold beside that fierce 
light which falls upon human life as he sees 
it at first-hand. He is tempted to be par- 
ticularly impatient of such a subject as 
philosophy, feeling as if hours spent in its 
study are robbed from human beings and 
given to mere mummies of thought. 

Many a man of this type is rather proud 
of the fact that he has no philosophy. He 
pronounces the word "metaphysical" — when 
he does deign to pronounce it — with a de- 
tectable accent of scorn. He is busy with 
actual life while the philosopher is engaged 

46 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

with intellectual puzzles. By all means let 
the philosopher go on piecing together his 
tiny fragments of thought to make the com- 
plete picture. If he finds it interesting, there 
is no harm in it. Still, there are weightier 
matters with which he might well be en- 
gaged. Such is his attitude. This superior 
feeling which the practical preacher often 
shares with the man on the street, as regards 
this matter of philosophy, will not bear close 
inspection, as natural as it is. Just because 
he is so close to life the practical preacher 
is often its victim rather than its master. 
He lacks largeness of view, proportion of 
thought, mental discipline — the very quali- 
ties which philosophic study would give. 
And again and again life simply sweeps 
him along in a current of vital and master- 
ful feeling whose real significance he does 
not understand. He is alive to the finger 
tips, but he is not capable of farsighted or 
dependable leadership. And he is not ca- 
pable of seeing life calmly or in the widest 
relations. He has never caught even as an 
ideal the thought of seeing life steadily and 
seeing it whole. 

47 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

There is some explanation and a measure 
of excuse for this type of preacher, how- 
ever, when we compare him with the man 
who has nothing but a philosophy. He 
himself has made the comparison, and, 
though he is fairly modest, he knows that 
the result is all in his favor. The man with 
nothing but a philosophy has gone with 
Ezekiel into the valley of dry bones. He 
has made wonderful collections of bones. 
He has fastened them together properly 
with little wires so that he has a nimiber of 
skeletons, instead of a mass of separate bones 
lying about. He surveys his work with 
pride. It is scrupulously correct and is 
really very wonderful. But it has never 
occurred to this man that he has still only 
a collection of bones. The result is fit for 
a museum but not fit for the tasks of life. 
It was his business to prophesy to these 
bones, so that they would live, with vital 
organs and muscles and nerves, with flash- 
ing eyes and quick hands. That would have 
been a mighty work indeed. And it would 
have answered all criticisms. As it is, he 
found bones and he has bones still, only care- 
48 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

fully classified and fitted together, according 
to a thoughtful scheme. The vital, dynamic 
preacher instinctively feels a certain amount 
of scorn for the man who is only capable 
of classifying bones. 

The picture we have painted is not over- 
drawn. There are men who have quite lost 
contact with life, in the midst of philosophic 
speculations. They ring the changes on 
great names in their sermons, but they have 
no power to relate what they are thinking 
to living men and living issues in a living 
way. 

There can be no greater mistake, however, 
than to judge the significance of philosophic 
study for the preacher by this partly arti- 
ficial, partly academic product. His faults 
have cast a shadow on a noble and important 
study, but they do not follow organically 
from its pursuit. We must judge of any 
study, not by what it does for the block- 
heads, or the dilettantes, or the polarized 
specialists, but by what it does for real men 
living real lives and relating them to large 
and far-reaching and vital issues. 

Let us take a quick survey of the work 
49 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

of a masterful and magnetic man, a true 
preacher of the gospel with a living faith in 
Christ, and a passionate interest in men, 
and let us see by a few glimpses earnest 
and discriminating, even if in a sense fleet- 
ing, what the study of philosophy will do 
for him. 

I 

He is a student of philosophy, first as a 
means of mental discipline. He has learned 
that he cannot take his mind as a matter of 
course. At least if he does, it will run away 
with him. It is like a wild and spirited 
steed which he must tame and master. 
It has all sorts of odd tricks and strange 
ways, and every one of them he must under- 
stand if he is to use his steed for long 
intellectual journeys. It will draw a great 
load of thought if it is properly trained, but 
it must feel the bit in its mouth and the 
hand of the master on the rein all the while. 

Now, for the revealing of what the mind 
is like, of what it is capable, what are its 
limitations, and how it ought to be used, 
there is no study like philosophy. Some- 
times, it is true, the student feels that he is 

50 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

watching Don Quixotes fighting imaginary 
battles with immense zest and confidence, 
but even then he is learning much about the 
ways of the mind and the character of 
thought. The failui'es of philosophy have 
ahnost as much to teach men as its successes. 
If poetry is a revelation of the human heart, 
philosophy is a revelation of the human 
mind, and the close and intimate knowledge 
of how the mind has worked for thousands 
of years, as it has attacked the ultimate 
problems of existence, is of the greatest 
value to the preacher. Emerson once de- 
clared, "All that Shakespeare says of a king, 
yonder boy reading in a corner feels to be 
true of himself." It is also true that many 
of the things a preacher learns about the 
movement and work of the mind in his philo- 
sophical study wdll have the most practical 
application to his own congregation. Said 
a thoughtful but not widely read farmer to 
Wliittier, "That JNIr. Plato had a good many 
of my ideas." But, more than this, not 
simply the contents of active minds have 
these unexpected relations, so that Hera- 
chtus reappears in Bergson and Democritus 
51 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

reappears in a modern scientist, but even 
more the habits of the mind have a universal 
hkeness. The man who knows philosophy 
in a free and understanding way knows how 
the mind works. Then the mental elasticity 
and sympathy required to understand the 
various movements of philosophy and the 
habits of mind expressed in them are all the 
while making the mind of the student a 
keen and sharpened instrument for clear 
and coherent and dependable thought. He 
is not only learning more about other people 
so that he can deal with them more ade- 
quately. He is learning about his own mind 
and is becoming skilled in using it. Many a 
mistake which would once have been very 
natural now becomes impossible. JNIany a 
complex situation is easily dealt with by 
means of his new powers of thought. Many 
a difficult feat of mental achievement comes 
quite within his scope. He has a new mental 
and practical mastery because, in some 
measure, he is lord of his own mind. 

II 
Then the preacher studies philosophy for 
52 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

the methods of thought he may learn. Some 
men have scorned philosophy because 
philosophers so violently disagree. As a 
matter of fact, that is one of the great things 
about philosophy. A distinguished pro- 
fessor of theology has said that if a man has 
one commentary on a book of the Bible, he 
is in a sense its slave ; but if he has two com- 
mentaries, they are sure to disagree, and 
then he will have to think for himself. The 
same thing is true in philosophy. The very 
disagreement will stimulate the student to 
a closer scrutiny of the methods by which 
such diverse conclusions were reached. And 
all the while he will be unconsciously mas- 
tering the utensils of a variety of intellectual 
approach and appraisal. As the reader of 
Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, 
which tells the same storv from ten or twelve 
different points of view, is startled out of 
mental provinciality, so the student of 
philosophy finds himself changed from a 
man of one or two tools and a limited in- 
tellectual horizon into a man with a great 
collection of utensils and a knowledge of how 
to use them effectively. Often he will use 
53 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

his tools in a way of which the originator 
never dreamed. Aristotle did not know that 
he was preparing a mold into whose forms 
Thomas Aquinas would fit the theology of 
the Middle Ages. The modern pragmatist 
does not know how deft an instrument he 
has forged for the justification and interpre- 
tation and proper placing of Christian ex- 
perience in an adequate philosophy. In all 
the schools of thought there are tools wait- 
ing for the use of alert minds, and there are 
methods whose possibilities have never been 
fully worked out. As Bauer applied the 
Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to 
New Testament criticism, so many a philo- 
sophic principle is yet to be applied to con- 
crete problems. Even when the result is 
not final it is sure, because of the fresh ap- 
proach, and new placing of the material to 
throw light — sometimes a veritable flood of 
light — upon old problems. As long as a 
man is taking fresh tools from the foundries 
of philosophy he will be in no danger of 
that deadly dullness which carries so many 
men to their intellectual graves. To his 
sight he will add insight. 

54 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

He will be making discoveries and grow- 
ing all the while. 

Ill 

Coming nearer to the heart of the matter, 
we may say that the preacher studies phi- 
losophy in order that he may learn how the 
great thinkers have interpreted the miiverse 
and life. He comes to examine conclusions 
as well as to learn methods of thought. 
From the Ionian school of Greek thinkers, 
who studied things rather than minds or 
morals ; from the Sophists, who so interpreted 
minds as to loosen all sense of moral values ; 
from Socrates, who rose from facts to "prin- 
ciples"; from Plato, who set going the 
processes of transcendental idealism; from 
Aristotle, who arranged the first finely 
articulated mental cabinet with pigeonholes 
for the classification of all forms of knowl- 
edge — from these and from many others all 
through the history of philosophical thought 
the preacher is learning how to look at life 
through vastly different eyes from his own 
and to see what is involved in all these differ- 
ent world-views. At first the experience 
55 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

seems somewhat kaleidoscopic, but as the 
preacher becomes more at home in the high- 
ways and byways which lead through the 
City of Philosophy, he finds a deep human 
meaning in every system, and a palpitating 
heart, as well as a ticking mind, expressing 
itself in what at first seemed hard, cold 
thought secreted from man's mind. He 
takes his stand at various spots in various 
ages and waits until the masters come to 
tell him what they think and how they feel 
about life. He watches the grating wheels 
of Schopenhauer's pessimism and surveys 
the vast synthetic movements of Hegel's 
mind. He sees how some men have been 
essentially critical in their sharpest work 
from the time of Zeno. He sees how some 
men are born builders, like Plato construct- 
ing a house for the mind. A new sense of 
the vastness and wonder of life comes home 
to him as he surveys these glacial movements 
of far-reaching thought. He feels the need 
of various types, and as he examines system 
after system, each having some contribution 
to make, he develops an eclectic mood, feel- 
ing that the final system must be large 

56 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

enough to include the truths which have been 
seen and proclaimed by all these men. He 
also develops a sharply critical mood. The 
final system must repudiate many a false 
principle and many a false conclusion. A 
man is forced to discriminate as he studies 
philosophy. Looking over the past, the 
preacher sees that some men have never 
gotten beyond things — here the early Greeks 
began, and here they remained; some think- 
ers have never gotten beyond substance — 
the Eleatic mood persists as an inspiration 
and in a measure as a danger in every 
monistic scheme; some men have never got- 
ten beyond movement — Herachtus has still 
his votaries; some men have never gotten 
beyond the individual — the relativists are 
still in the land; some have never gotten 
beyond principles, not realizing that a prin- 
ciple per se is an abstraction which itself 
must be explained — on this rock the Hegel- 
ians came to grief; some men never get be- 
yond forces, and with Herbert Spencer are 
in danger of reaching what only seem ulti- 
mate ideas when they are actually carrying 
words farther than the words can carry 
57 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

meaning. At a certain point very noble 
philosophies become verbal miless they rise 
from principles and forces to an ultimate 
person. It is when he reaches personalism 
that the preacher lifts his head. Here is a 
system large enough when properly con- 
strued to make room for all sorts of facts 
and experiences, and to set all in the light 
of an infinite Person of moral, mental, and 
spiritual perfection, the Lord of life. The 
preacher is interested in all the systems, but 
his philosophical journey leads to a grand 
terminal at last, and he is glad when his 
train rolls into the station and he has reached 
his journey's end. There is still room for 
no end of study. But it is in working out 
the implications of a personal philosophy 
and not in finding a substitute for it. 

IV 

Furthermore, the preacher studies phi- 
losophy because of its influence on life. The 
great systems are not merely interpretations 
of life. They are powers in life. They are 
dynamic. They set in motion new machin- 

58 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

eiy. The buzzing wheels and moving belts 
of life are connected with a philosophical 
dynamo far more frequently than we reahze. 
And even the man in the street is often un- 
consciously expressing the implications of 
the thought of some philosopher, of whose 
name he may never have heard. If j^ou 
know the philosophical background of his 
opinions, you understand him better than he 
understands himself. 

The influence of Aristotle on the Middle 
Ages was deep and far-reaching. Wlien 
walking in an American city you sometimes 
see the large steel framework of a building, 
standing in striking relief while it waits for 
each separate story to be built in. Such a 
framework Aristotle furnished for much 
that w^as significant of the thought of the 
JMiddle Ages. The very existence of the 
United States of America is in one way re- 
lated to a series of philosophical movements. 
You must understand deism with its confi- 
dence in human nature, and you must under- 
stand the French philosophy of the latter 
part of the eighteenth century if you would 
understand the Declaration of Independ- 
59 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

ence, and some of the most influential prin- 
ciples which entered into the life of the re- 
public. 

Sometimes a philosophical system dwarfs 
the life of the man who holds it. And such 
a system may take from the vitality and 
vigor of the life of a country or of an age. 
When the rigid principles of a system are 
put on the throne in such a fashion that a 
man does not dare to do anything which the 
system does not justify, life is robbed of 
freshness and initiative and power. Then 
a man wears his philosophy as a prisoner 
wears chains. He is no longer a free man. 
He looks out on the world from behind the 
bars of his point of view. As the preacher 
sees these things he comes to understand that 
principles are to be used as servants and not 
as tyrannical masters. The}^ are to be used 
as teachers and not as slave-drivers. And 
sometimes the best tribute a student can pay 
to his teacher is to disagree with him. This 
does not mean that the individual thinker is 
to be lawless. It means that his loyalty to 
commanding principles is the loyalty of a 
free man to whom life is larger and more 

60 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

dominant than the relentless absolutism of 
formal logic. As Oliver Wendell Holmes 
so brilliantly suggests in "The One-Hoss 
Shay," there are times when to be perfectly 
logical is to be perfectly absurd. Thus the 
preacher comes to understand the possibili- 
ties of danger, as well as the possibilities of 
great good in the influence of philosophy 
upon life. 

V 

All this leads us naturally to our next 
consideration, namely, that the alert 
preacher studies philosophy because the life 
of any period inevitably creates a philosophy, 
inevitably eventuates in a philosophical ex- 
pression and interpretation. 

The scientific developments of the nine- 
teenth century in large measure created the 
synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. 
Darwin expressed a principle in one field. 
Spencer made it the ultimate principle of 
existence, the commanding feature of his 
philosophy. The pointing out of the defects 
of such a system never destroys it as long 
as the system answers to something deep and 
real in the life of a period. There will be 
61 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

men whose working theory of hfe is based on 
the principles of the synthetic philosophy 
long after Spencer has been discredited as a 
philosophic master among all adequately 
critical minds. There is something about 
the processes of practical scientific work 
which is caught completely by Spencer. The 
scientist's use of law as a working hypothesis 
exactly corresponds to Spencer's sense of 
law. The stars in their courses seem to fight 
for the synthetic philosophy. It is only as 
we realize that life itself is treated cavalierly, 
that large territories of human experience 
are ignored by Spencer, that a genuine re- 
action sets in. It is as the vital streams rise 
and overflow their banks that philosophical 
inadequacies are swept away. Thus life is 
the final critic as well as the creator of 
philosophies. 

All this is clearly illustrated in the phi- 
losophy of Rudolf Eucken, in that of 
Henri Bergson, and in the methods of the 
pragmatists. In the closest and most power- 
ful and fully conscious wa}^ life rather than 
technical logic is master in these newer move- 
ments. What has often happened, without 

62 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

the philosophers' actually understanding 
what was going on, here happens with the 
philosophers, full knowledge and consent. 
These present schools set up the flag of life 
and will fight under that standard against 
all comers. They see that majestic systems 
have sapped life of its vital energies, have 
proved but parasitic growths, and they 
bring against them all the weapons which 
a deep antagonism can procure. Life itself 
must be given the right of way. Philosophy 
must be made large enough to fit the facts 
of life, and life must never be allowed to 
shrink to fit the capacity of a particular 
system. By Eucken in particular it is clearly 
seen that the spiritual vitalities of life must 
not only be given place in philosophy, but 
they must determine the character of the 
philosophy. 

To the evangelical preacher all this is full 
of a deep encouragement. He knows that 
his Christian experience is the defining fact 
of his life, and he feels at once kinship with 
thinkers who insist that philosophy shall be 
as large as experience, even if they have not 
understood the significance and implications 

63 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of Christian experience. He can use their 
principles often when he cannot accept their 
positions. To live in an age when teclinical 
rules are being made subservient to the pal- 
pitating realities of life is the supreme 
philosophical opportunity of a Christian 
thinker. 

VI 

Then the preacher studies philosophy 
because even philosophical errors indicate an 
intellectual need which must be met and 
satisfied in some more adequate way. A 
brilliant theologian once said, "A heresy is 
a genuine hunger eating the wrong fruit.'' 
This is eminently true of the errors of 
philosophy. Nature has a way of taking 
sudden and startling revenge on that which 
is one-sided. To go against nature in this 
regard is to court disaster. There comes a 
sudden cataclysm and the thing we had ruled 
out breaks in with tyrannous force. This 
is seen in individual lives, in nations, and in 
systems of thought. Excesses are produced 
by the omissions and inadequacies of power- 
ful and influential systems. The new sj^stem 
swings to the very extreme of the pendulum 

64 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

with terrific force. Over against an ascetic 
interpretation of life you have a wild and 
lawless Sybaritic philosophy. Over against 
a hard and cold intellectualism comes a 
philosophy which so emphasizes the practical 
that it ignores the proper claims of the intel- 
lect. Whenever a legitimate element is 
ruled out of one system it is sure to become 
an excess in the emphasis of another. The 
thinking of a particular skeptic is often 
psychologically a protest against systems 
which did not give rationahty its dues. The 
extravagances of mystical philosophy are a 
reaction from a barren and rigid rationalism. 
These things stand out in sharp perspective 
in the mind of the preacher as he critically 
inspects the defects of the various philo- 
sophic interpretations. There is always a 
truth waiting to be rescued from the heart 
of every error. 

The knowledge of these things does not 
give the preacher a kindly and hospitable 
feeling toward errors. He knows that they 
are all the more dangerous because of the 
truth which they shelter. This makes them 
respectable and gives them a hearing. Obvi- 
65 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

ous error would not be dangerous at all. So 
the careful detecting of the truth in an error, 
and the separating of the truth from the 
error, is a moral as well as a spiritual task. 
It is one which comes especially within the 
province of the preacher. 

This knowledge of the way in which error 
and truth get entangled, though it does not 
make the preacher a friend of error, does 
give him a new patience with earnest men 
who become confused and accept views of 
whose evil consequences they have no notion. 
He sees how they came to hold these views, 
and the good thing in them which must be 
conserved when the views themselves are 
cast away. And all this enables him to be 
a pastor of men's minds in a sense which was 
quite impossible before. He gives men a 
feeling that he possesses understanding 
sympathy even when he approaches their 
beliefs with a surgeon's knife. 

VII 

The preacher also studies philosophy 
because he knows that Christianity involves 
a philosophy as well as a hfe. He knows 

66 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

that if Christianity is true, some philosoph- 
ical systems must be in essence false. And 
he knows that if Christianity is true, some 
philosophical positions are permanently and 
conclusively established. He detects in our 
time a tendency to believe that you can be 
a Christian with your heart and your hand 
without being a Christian with your head, 
or, to put it in the words of an able theolo- 
gian, "a tendency to accept the spirit while 
discarding the philosophy of Christianity." 
This tendency to establish a dualism in the 
Christian religion he recognizes as a danger- 
ous, though often unconscious, antagonist 
of the Christian faith and life. Christianity 
must be intellectually commanding if it is to 
be morally convincing or spiritually satisfy- 
ing. In this sense there is such a thing as a 
Christian philosophy, and a sure and definite 
command of its sanctions and the fashion 
in which they articulate to form the basis of 
Christian behef the preacher desires to ob- 
tain. Here his acutest mental and moral 
and spiritual insight is required. He has 
come to grapple with ultimate problems 
upon which the vastest issues hang. Just 
67 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

because he is a Christian with a mind which 
insists on its rights he is driven into phi- 
losophy. And when he attains a mastery of 
those final verities upon which morals and 
religion, and even rationalit}^ hang, he has 
reached the meeting place of mind and heart 
and conscience, in a philosophy which makes 
him have a message as a preacher which 
combines the elements which nature unites 
in a man, and religion brings to their full- 
ness through the power of God. Even 
Albrecht Ritschl once admitted that if you 
shut metaphysics out of the front door, it 
will come in at the rear. The men who have 
tried to do without metaphysics have had 
to produce metaphysics in order to justify 
their doing without it. An unphilosophic 
Christianity is always in process of commit- 
ting intellectual suicide. 

Of course philosophy as a substitute for 
vital experience is one thing, and needs to 
be repudiated. Philosophy as the crystal- 
lization of vital experience is another, and 
must be conserved. The skeleton does not 
have to be visible to the naked eye because 
it is a necessary part of the hmnan organism. 

68 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

And philosophy does not need to be on dress 
parade all the while because it is an essential 
part of religion. But for all that, the Chris- 
tian religion without a loyal allegiance to its 
philosophical postulates is as much of a con- 
tradiction as is a human body, in perfect 
health and performing all its functions, 
without any bones. 

VIII 

Last of all, the preacher studies philoso- 
phy in order that he may have a philosophy 
of his own. Dr. Robert William Dale spoke 
potently of experiencing theism. By a 
powerful, dynamic Christian preacher his 
whole philosophy may be passed through 
his own experience and come forth blazing 
with the fires of his own life. As Paul said 
"my gospel," so he becomes able to say "my 
philosophy.'' His philosophic position as a 
Christian is not merely a classification of 
objective truths. It is objective truth be- 
come real in subjective experience. 

Professor Borden P. Bowne in his per- 
sonal idealism rendered a service to the 
Christian thinking of our time of the 
69 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

utmost value. His trenchant, critical mind 
bombarded ancient fallacies with a sureness 
and skill of the most extraordinary char- 
acter. And his constructive work offers a 
view of the universe where personality in 
God and man, moral freedom and responsi- 
bility, the dominance of the spiritual, and 
the coherence of physical, rational, ethical, 
and religious in a rich and roomy monism, 
with an ultimate person on the throne, are 
all secured. 

With all his services perhaps Professor 
Bowne had one limitation. He does not 
give you the sense of a triumphant experi- 
ence of his own philosophy. It is splendidly 
effective in its critical aspects, nobly ade- 
quate in its constructive work, but it remains 
objective. It does not become a subjective 
passion in the mind and the heart of the 
author. It is correct rather than in the 
highest sense kindling. All this is said in 
no spirit of disparagement of Professor 
Bowne. We owe him too much for that to 
be possible. It is said as a matter of point- 
ing out the way in which his own work should 
be carried on by his successors. Fill his 

70 



A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 

system with the fire of a noble mysticism and 
a sharper evangehcal passion, and it will 
move out to become more commanding and 
more efficient than it has ever been in the 
past. 

At any rate, the preacher must take this 
final step in regard to his philosophy. It 
must become not merely truth, but truth 
with summoning eyes, truth with a strong 
hand, truth with a throbbing heart, and in 
this triumphant experience of his own phi- 
losophy, the student, the preacher, the Chris- 
tian of spiritual passion, the devoted pastor, 
and the alert practical man meet and become 
one. The philosophy has become an evangel. 



71 



BERGSON, AS SEEN FROM A 
PREACHER'S STUDY 



CHAPTER III 

BERGSON, AS SEEN FROM A PREACHER'S 
STUDY 

I. The Standpoint of a Preacher in 
Philosophic Study 
Many a preacher has no attitude toward 
the study of the course of philosophic specu- 
lation. He simply ignores the whole sub- 
ject. He is interested in practical matters. 
He cares more about men than men's ideas. 
He cares more about life than philosophy. 
He is entirely engrossed with the effort to 
be an efficiency expert as regards the matter 
of winning and holding men for the king- 
dom of God, and administering the affairs 
of his church with skill and success. His 
laboratory is life; his experiment station is 
human experience. He gets his sermons 
from a constant and hearty human contact, 
illuminating his study of the Bible. He 
knows how to press the gospel home to the 
hearts of men. He speaks with the accents 
of vigorous and robust life. He makes no 
75 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

pretensions to being a scholar, but he is an 
effective evangelist as well as a preacher. 
Scattered over the country you find this 
type, in quiet hamlets and in thriving cities. 
The church owes a real debt to this expert in 
religion, even when he is a man who would 
soon get lost in discussing ideas about 
religion. 

It is quite easy to see, however, that this 
type of man fails of the highest efficiency. 
To care immensely about everything that 
pertains to men except their mental life is 
an incomplete devotion. To be an evangelist 
for the saving of men's souls without a mas- 
tering message for their minds is to perform 
an inadequate service. The man who speaks 
to less than the whole life can never be the 
most effective evangelist, and he is sure to 
be inadequate in the wider ministries of 
pastoral service. 

On the other hand, many a preacher is 
more interested in ideas than he is in people. 
He can outline the course of Greek phi- 
losophy more easily than he can follow the 
winding paths by means of which a strug- 
gling man finds his way to peace. He gets 

76 



BERGSON 

his knowledge of life second-hand ; the fresh 
currents set in motion by actual human con- 
tact do not throb through him. He has 
separated the mind from all the rich and 
diversified experience of the remainder of 
the life, and so his message is likely to be- 
come dignified and wise and impotent. To 
preach only to the mind is as great a mistake 
as to fail entirely to appeal to the mind. 
The distrust of the "philosophic preacher" 
is entirely a repugnance for the type of 
utterance which has intellect but is without 
the blood of life. It is one thing to describe 
the evangel with cold precision; it is quite 
another to preach it, with intellectual ade- 
quacy and also with a burning heart. 
Thought and feeling belong together. 

The most effective preacher has the virtues 
and shuns the weaknesses of the two types 
we have been analyzing. He is a man of 
men and a man of ideas. He is a student of 
books and a student of people. He is at 
home in philosophy, and he is at home in a 
human heart. Deeper than this, the real 
preacher is always a man of God. He does 
not leave his piety behind when he picks up 
77 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

a book of philosophy. He takes all there is 
of him into every intellectual endeavor of 
his life. His Christian experience has a 
position of defining power in every intel- 
lectual exploration which raises questions of 
moment as to life and destiny. 

This is a matter of supreme importance. 
Perhaps we can best put it in this way: 
When it comes to the study of philosophy 
the preacher is both the judge and a part of 
the evidence. The peril and the strategy 
of his situation lie in this fact. He is the 
judge, for he must study and weigh and 
appraise the system. With perfect candor 
and honesty he must take account of all that 
it has to say. But he does not approach the 
task without presuppositions. An open 
mind is not an empty mind. He himself is 
a part of the evidence to be considered. His 
own experience is part of the data to be 
taken account of. The philosophy he ac- 
cepts must be big enough to make room for 
his personal experience of salvation through 
Jesus Christ his Lord. All the facts and 
energies which have to do with the new life 
in Christ must find a comfortable home in 
78 



BERGSOl^^ 

the philosophy which he makes his own. He 
never tries to make his experience shrink to 
fit his philosophy. It is the business of a 
philosophy to organize and interpret the 
facts of experience, not to change or distort 
them. And the preacher knows that his 
Christian experience is as defining as any 
fact of life. 

This does not mean that he is narrow- 
minded. It does not mean that he is a bigot. 
It does not mean that he is unwilling to 
accept new truth. It just means that he 
has such a complete sense of the true scien- 
tific method that he will insist that all the 
facts must be faced. As an unclassified 
flower, if it had a voice, might say to a 
botanist, "You must take account of me"; 
as a strange insect with bright wings might 
say to the scientist who scrutinized it, "You 
must alter your classification to make room 
for me"; as any physical or chemical fact 
has the right of way through any speculative 
theory, so a Christian experience and all the 
facts and truths involved in it have the right 
of way. The preacher with the real experi- 
ence of these things in his life has a perfect 
79 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

right to say to the philosopher, "No system 
is adequate which does not make room for 
me." 

And the making room must be of a char- 
acter which leaves all the creative power and 
moral splendor of a Christian experience 
intact. To explain a Christian experience 
in such a way that you make its repetition 
impossible is in effect to deny it. To inter- 
pret a Christian experience in such a way 
that the man who accepted the interpretation 
could never experience the moral invigora- 
tion and spiritual renewal of such an ex- 
perience is to distort an important series of 
facts. It is utterly unworthy of the spirit 
of candid scientific procedure. 

These things the preacher holds firm in 
his mind as he approaches the study of 
philosophy. He sharpens his mind with 
every discipline in philosophic research. He 
is open to new truth everywhere. But he 
never forgets that he has in his own experi- 
ence some defining truth which must have 
commanding place in the final philosophic 
synthesis. He is both the judge and a part 
of the evidence. And he never forgets his 

80 



BERGSON 

significance as evidence while he is thinking 
of his duties as judge. 

II. The Modeen Philosophic Situation 

When we attempt to get at the heart of 
the modern philosophic situation a thousand 
clamorous voices cry for a hearing. Many 
of them are characterized by loudness rather 
than by importance, and our task is to find 
those few defining assertions which gave its 
quality to the thought of the time. Bent on 
this quest, we soon discover that philosophy 
in the nineteenth century was much like a 
great feast at which a certain Banquo's 
ghost insisted on appearing just when the 
guests had settled down comfortably to en- 
joy themselves. The feast was wonderfully 
well set out, the viands included every deli- 
cacy of the mind and much that was sub- 
stantial as well. But the ghost had a way 
of taking one's appetite. Sometimes the 
feast was given by one philosophic school 
and sometimes by another. But still the 
ghost would appear at the most disconcert- 
ing and inopportune times. 

It has not proved too difficult to think 
81 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

the universe into unity and coherency, but 
somehow you make it a machine in the 
process. The ghost is the ghost of necessity. 
Just when everything is well arranged and 
properly classified, you find that you do not 
have a living organism but a dead machine. 
There is no fault to find with the classifica- 
tion except that life has slipped through it 
and escaped. Movement and change in any 
living sense are forever done for. You were 
seeking a palace of the mind and you have 
found a sarcophagus. 

The whole materialistic philosophy of the 
century just gone is one illustration in point. 
Expressed with wonderful brilliancy and 
skill in the synthetic philosophy of Herbert 
Spencer, it fairly captured the imagination 
of thousands of men. A far-flung battle line 
the synthetic philosophy spread out with all 
of life and all of the universe and all that 
comes within the range of experience as the 
object of its mastery. Nobody could deny 
the power of the brain that worked out the 
system. Nobody could deny the splendid 
powers of observation and generalization 
shown by the system itself. But just as 

82 



BERGSON 

everybody was enjoying the feast the ghost 
appeared. The system was seen to account 
for everything else in existence by denying 
the one thing which makes existence itself 
worth while. Freedom was politely bowed 
out of the imiverse. Personality was made a 
mechanical device and not a matter of free 
intention. There were ultimate forces, but 
they belonged to a great universal mecha- 
nism of moving belts and revolving wheels. 
As far as intention, purpose, and free move- 
ment are concerned, where the names were 
kept the reality had vanished. The body of 
life had been dissected but the soul had 
escaped. 

It was not hard to point out internal con- 
tradictions in the system. It was not hard 
to show that it implicitly assumed the very 
things it later denied. It was clear that you 
could never account for the synthetic phi- 
losophy itself on the basis of its own postu- 
lates. To build such a system required the 
very free mental movement which the system 
denied. 

All this was true, but, deeper than this, 
the system was an attack on life itself. It 
83 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

robbed men of the sense of freedom and 
responsibility, of creative energy and full- 
ness of power. It sapped the roots of morals 
and religion. In dealing with physical facts 
it refused to take account of the most out- 
standing facts of the mental and moral and 
religious experience of the race. It was 
unconsciously an attempt to dam up the 
movement of life itself. Of course the 
mighty river simply rose above the dam and 
swept on. There was some devastation in 
the process, but life could not be impeded. 
N'o philosophy can survive which lifts a 
defiant hand in the face of life itself. 

Another characteristic expression of phil- 
osophic speculation might seem to promise 
more. The Hegelian philosophy did not 
begin with things. It began with thought. 
It entered the sanctuary of the mind and 
took its own process as its guide. The thesis 
and antithesis and synthesis of the Hegelian 
philosophy were an attempt to make the 
logical movement of the thought process 
itself the explanation of the problems of 
existence. Here is surely a lofty idealism. 
Now the great things of mind and spirit 

84 



BERGSON 

will come to their own. Thought is on the 
throne and the blighting power of material- 
ism has been overthrown. It is a severely 
intellectual feast at which the Hegelians sit 
down. All is moving with lofty propriety 
when suddenly the ghost appears. It cannot 
be! Yes, indeed, it is the same old ghost of 
necessity. We have escaped from the lion 
to confront the bear. We have escaped 
physical necessity to find mental necessity. 
The universe is still a big machine, only 
now it is a mental machine instead of a 
physical machine. Thought proves as re- 
lentless a tyrant as things, and life and free- 
dom and any real responsibility are again 
banished from the universe. 

A system built on logic instead of on a 
logician is sure to prove a system of neces- 
sity. Hegelianism worshiped logic and left 
the logician quite out of account. It bowed 
down before thought and enunciated prin- 
ciples which made a free and responsible 
and living thinker forever impossible. 

Here again it is easy to find technical 
errors and contradictions. But here again 
the deeper matter is that the system was a 
85 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

defiance of living experience and not an ex- 
pression of it. Life was dwarfed; all its 
facts were not faced. The biggest experi- 
ences of men were left out of the circle of 
the truth as it is in Hegelianism. The men 
who tried to live in the system wore it hke 
chains. The great currents of life swept 
past it. Intellectual necessity proved as im- 
potent as physical necessity to be specu- 
latively satisfying to men. 

Here, then, we have the typical nine- 
teenth-century movements as far as the 
widest influence and power are concerned, 
and both of them strikingly failing to meet 
the demands of life. Were there no voices 
of revolt? Were there no prophets of the 
currents of life itself? Did the goddess 
Necessity call and ordain all who spoke in 
the courts of Philosophy? 

The answer is that there were right 
vigorous and notable voices of protest. In 
America Professor Borden P. Bowne, 
through a long and notable career at Boston 
University, was a voice crying in the wilder- 
ness, in the name of a personal interpreta- 
tion of the universe, with the freedom of a 

86 



BERGSON 

personal agent as the final and decisive fact. 
In England Dr, Hastings Rashdall gave 
forth a system of personal philosophy with 
genuine kinship to that of Professor Bowne, 
and so in the two great English-speaking 
nations the voice speaking for free and un- 
coerced personal agency at the heart of 
things was heard. In Germany Professor 
Rudolf Eucken carefully worked out and 
gave forth his philosophy of Activism. 
Essentially his thinking is another protest in 
the name of life, it is another voice crying, 
"Life itself has the right of way." 

In both England and America the prag- 
matists joined the protesting voices. Prag- 
matism may mean either a method or a 
philosophy, or both. But it always means 
an appeal to life. Everything must go 
down before life. If logic lies wounded and 
helpless, the pragmatists will do nothing, 
providing life goes on its way, full of 
strength and power, unattacked and un- 
harmed. Among these voices of protest one 
of the very most potent is that of Bergson. 
He is the great leader in France of the 
revolt from Necessit}^ and his voice has 
87 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

become one of worldwide significance and 
influence. 

III. The Philosophy or Bergson 

Henri Bergson is a Parisian by birth and 
is now fifty-six years of age. Educated 
at the Lycee Condor cet and the Ecole 
Normale Superieure, his early interest was 
mathematics, and he later graduated in 
philosophy. He spent seventeen years 
teaching in various schools, and in 1900 was 
appointed to a professorship of the College 
de France, which professorship he now 
occupies. In 1901 he was elected a member 
of the Institute. 

"To say that his lectures have made him 
world famous and that men of many coun- 
tries and races flock to the somber lecture 
room of the old College de France is to give 
a fair indication of the tremendous and al- 
most protean influence of Bergsonism. His 
is the largest lecture room the college can 
boast, but not nearly large enough to ac- 
commodate the polyglot crowd of both sexes 
that gathers every Wednesday" (E. Her- 
mann in Eucken and Bergson). 

88 



BERGSON 

Bergson's style is a marvel of lucidity, 
precision, and charm, and his illustrations 
are of a felicity which fills his hearers with 
glad surprise. His power of thought is 
easily equaled by his skill in expression. The 
following of Bergson's works — and they 
include his most important utterances — have 
been translated into English : Time and Free 
Will, 1910 (published in French in 1888) ; 
Matter and Memory, 1911 (in French, 
1896) ; Creative Evolution, his fullest and 
most thoroughgoing exposition of his phi- 
losophy, 1911 (in French in 1907) ; Laugh- 
ter, 1911 (in French, 1901). 

The preacher who wants to know some- 
thing of Bergson will do well to begin with 
H. Wildon Carr's little book, Henri Berg- 
son, The Philosophy of Change (in The 
People's Books, published in New York, by 
the Dodge Publishing Co. ) . This he may 
follow with Mrs. E. Hermann's brilliant 
and powerful study, Eucken and Bergson 
(The Pilgrim Press). Then he should 
plunge directly into the Creative Evolution 
itself. 

Now, what is Bergson's distinctive posi- 
89 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

tion as a philosopher, and how does he 
approach the problems which existence and 
experience present to us? We may best 
begin with his conception of time, for here 
he strikes a distinctive note. The historic 
conception of time, he tells us, is really time 
translated into space. When we speak of 
time we mean the things that happen and 
not the duration itself. And because of this 
slipping into one meaning when we use 
another word, all sorts of confusion arise. 
Time becomes a contradicting conception or 
a mere mental form when viewed in this way. 
But, according to Bergson, the very thing 
which escapes us when we speak of time is 
the vital thing not only in time but in ex- 
istence. The experience of duration is the 
fundamental fact of life. We experience 
duration as a movement of which we are 
deeply conscious in our moments of extreme 
intuitive sympathy. And this movement of 
duration with which we are one in our 
deepest sense of life is the very stuff of which 
reality is made. Because of this position 
Bergson has been called the modern 
Heraclitus. 

90 



BERGSON 

The idealist begins with thought, and does 
not know what to do with things. The 
reahst begins with things and never success- 
fully makes his peace with thought. Berg- 
son begins with that experience of change 
of which both thought and things are as- 
pects and so finds a tertium quid by means 
of which he can deal with both. 

This fundamental movement is infinitely 
larger than human experience, though by 
intuition we feel our oneness with it. And 
this ceaseless, changing duration is the last 
fact of reahty and the basis of knowledge. 
This great movement is like a vital energy 
pushing its way to complete expression and 
coming out in various ways. The slumber 
of the plant, the instinct of the animal, and 
the knowledge of man are various burstings 
forth of this vital moving energy. The 
intellect is man's organ for dealing with ex- 
perience. It takes snapshots, as it were, of 
the rapidly moving train. These snapshots 
are very useful, but for philosophic pur- 
poses they are always misleading. In the 
picture the train is always standing still. It 
is of the very nature of the intellect that it 

91 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

must seem to bring creation to a standstill 
in order to apprehend it. But for all that, 
the fundamental characteristic of existence 
is the one which the snapshot does not reveal. 

Is there any way, then, by which we can 
get at reality? Is the intellect merely a 
practical tool which leaves us helpless when 
we approach the great philosophic prob- 
lems? The reply is that our own conscious- 
ness is larger than intellect. There is a 
fringe of consciousness which does not take 
snapshots but knows itself as one with the 
movement of life. We must seize this fringe, 
this intuition of the movement, and here we 
shall find genuine, if fleeting, knowledge of 
reality itself. The deep sense of oneness 
with the changing movement of duration is 
the fundamental fact for philosophy. 

This movement is an endless creative 
activity. It does not look ahead. But it 
does carry all the past with it in the illu- 
minated action of the present. The process 
of evolution is not toward a foreseen goal. 
It is a fresh, creative output, always bring- 
ing forth something new. After the new is 
brought forth you can fit it into a scheme. 

92 



BERGSON 

But there was no scheme beforehand. It is 
utterly free, entirely full of creative energy, 
a great current which perpetually changes 
and continually creates. 

Reality is the movement. Thought is a 
snapshot which sees it, or a section of it, at 
a standstill. Matter is the section we seem 
to see but is really a part of the movement. 
Intuition is the experience of oneness with 
the movement. This mighty vital push, the 
very self of duration, the very heart of 
change, is the ultimate reality. It is free, 
it is creative. 

The intellect is an organ for dealing with 
aspects of the movement in a practical way. 
It is of practical value just because it en- 
ables us to see sections at a standstill, so 
that we can deal with life; but because the 
soul of the movement slips away from the 
grasp of the intellect, it can never in its own 
strength build up an adequate philosophy. 
The systems of physical mechanism and 
intellectual mechanism are what they are 
because of this fact. The intellect sees things 
in a mechanical way. But the larger sense 
of reality which intuition gives us opens the 
93 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

door to the true philosophy. When we ex- 
perience our oneness with the creative move- 
ment we have at last reached the defining 
fact of existence. We have touched reality 
itself. 

IV. Features or Bergson^s Philosophy 

or Service to the Christian 

Thinker 

The preacher who reads Bergson soon 
feels that there is a certain mood about his 
philosophy which has very real kinship with 
the mood of the preacher. Deeper than 
that, again and again there is a ring about 
the very phrases of Bergson which is like 
the ring of human experience as is recog- 
nized in the preacher's mind and heart. The 
sense of movement, of activity, of stir, of a 
universe in which things happen corresponds 
to the deepest knowledge and intuitions of 
the preacher himself. The trouble about 
mechanical interpretations of the universe 
is just at this point. They leave no room 
for anything really to happen. There is no 
room for tragedy. There is no room for 
comedy. It is a closed universe with room 

94 



BERGSON 

for nothing but a careful system of pigeon- 
holes. 

Bergson from the start gives you the 
feeling that his philosophy strikes the note 
of life itself. The consciousness of creative 
energy in a man's soul is answered to by the 
placing of creative energy at the heart of 
philosophy. Then the emphasis on freedom 
is most welcome to the Christian thinker. 
He is tired of being a practical believer in 
freedom and a theoretic behever in necessity. 
The philosophy of Bergson gives a world of 
initiative, of uncoerced movement, a world 
where no frowning physical or logical laws 
leave freedom to perish among the wastes of 
thought. The kingliness of freedom is recog- 
nized in Bergson's philosophy as perhaps 
it has never been recognized before. Then 
the sense of great things to come is welcome 
to the Christian thinker. Life is not finished. 
The world is not completed. The creative 
energy is now at work. We are not spec- 
tators, watching the curtain fall on the last 
act. We are participants, and we may well 
believe that the great action is yet to come. 
A splendid optimism naturally flows from 
95 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

such a philosophy. Again, the emphasis on 
activity fits the thought of the preacher. It 
helps a man to believe in effort. It sets free 
initiative. It sends a man forth to do and to 
dare. He is a part of a universe in action, 
and he himself may realize some of its won- 
derful potencies. Last of all, the emphasis 
on the sympathetic intuition which puts us 
within the circle of reality in a sense impos- 
sible to pure intellect is welcome to the 
Christian. His own Christian experience 
has just this quality at its highest, and he 
is glad to find philosophy recognizing the 
validity of the sympathetic intuition, which 
he knows may be the saint's sense of God, 
as well as the philosopher's sense of oneness 
with the movement of duration. The atmos- 
phere, then, and many of the contentions of 
Bergson's philosophy come to the preacher 
in his study as assets he is glad to receive. 

V. Features Which Cause the Chris- 
tian Thinker to Hesitate, 
Question, and Criticise 

All that we have said is by no means 
intended to suggest that Bergson is a Chris- 

96 



BERGSON 

tian philosopher. He often gives the Chris- 
tian thinker tools which he himself would 
never dream of using in the way which im- 
mediately suggests itself to the Christian. 
Bergson is very eager about consciousness 
and creative energy. But does he lift them 
to the place where he makes them our secure 
possession? Does he see that these things 
are only figures of speech unless they are 
the characteristics of a person ? Does he see 
that the push of creative evolution must be 
the conscious intention of a mighty personal 
agent? Does he know that his own enthusi- 
astic propaganda hangs ready to fall back 
into necessity, for all his fine phrases, unless 
he lifts it clear and clean by recognizing the 
personal agency which is one with the crea- 
tive movement of duration? 

We are not able to make an affirmative 
reply to these questions. Bergson is eager 
to save freedom and creative energy and 
fullness of life, but he has not yet been will- 
ing to find their security in the clear and 
definite recognition that active personal 
agency — the activity of God — is the heart 
of the whole matter. 

97 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

Now, unless we rise from what Bergson 
gives us to this higher conception, we cannot 
permanently hold the ground for which he 
so valiantly fights. Many of his noblest 
passages become mere figures of speech, un- 
less we put living, active personality back 
of them for their support. This hesitancy 
about personality is united with other fail- 
ures to discriminate closely. Bergson has 
what we may almost call a great antipathy 
to final causes. But a free personal agent 
may be able to preside over the movement 
just because he is the movement and makes 
his intention potent. The freedom of the 
movement is the freedom of the personality 
who is the movement, and while a freely 
chosen goal toward which the whole creation 
moves may present difficulties to the mind, 
they are outweighed by the greater difficul- 
ties attending any other conception. Final 
causes are not our foes but our friends. 

If we make personal agency in free and 
self -chosen action the core of the movement 
of creative evolution, we shall escape the 
snares which beset the path in which Berg- 
son is now walking. 

98 



BERGSON 

VI. Is There Such a Thing as a 
Christian Philosophy? 

Of course, there is a sense in which phi- 
losophy may not be called Christian any 
more than may mathematics. There are 
aspects of experience whose interpretation 
is as much apart from rehgion as the fact 
that two and two are four. In many a range 
of its speculations philosophy is dealing with 
things which do not belong to morals or to 
religion. But when we come to the deepest 
matters of life and destiny, Christian ex- 
perience has implications of which philoso- 
phy must take account. The metaphysical 
implications of Christian experience are far- 
reaching. They include: 1. A personal God. 
2. A personal revelation. 3. An Incarna- 
tion of the Son of God in human life. 4. A 
world presided over by the will of its per- 
sonal Deity. 5. A divine deed of suffering 
rescue. 6. A goal for life secured by the 
character, the purposes, and the will of God. 

Now, a philosophy which makes room for 
these facts will be transformed by them. It 
will be dominated by them. They will be- 
99 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

come the defining facts of the system. In 
this sense we have a right to speak of a 
Christian philosophy. And from this stand- 
point we must say that Bergson offers many 
materials which may be used in a truly Chris- 
tian interpretation of the universe and all 
the phenomena of existence and life. But 
we must add that his own use of his mate- 
rials, as thus far seen, leaves out of account 
many of those supreme facts which the 
Christian thinker can never ignore. 



100 



THE RELIGION OF A 
SCIENTIFIC MAN 



CHAPTER IV 
THE RELIGION OF A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

Is science the friend or the foe of reh- 
gion? It depends a great deal on the science. 
It depends much on the rehgion. It de- 
pends most of all on the man who is trying 
to make a place in his life for the postulates 
of science and the sanctions of a religious 
experience. 

That particular scientific views have made 
religion impossible to some men cannot be 
denied. That particular religious views 
have caused some men to refuse to give a 
candid and open hearing to modern science 
is equally true. That we live in a period 
when there is no end of confusion and heart- 
searching and brain-searching, when the 
way of faith is often difficult and the way 
of doubt is often easy, is patent to every 
thoughtful man. It is also fairly clear that 
the religious obscurantists add to the diffi- 
culty and practical perplexity. It is certain 
that some types of scientific dogmatists 
103 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

throw dust in the air just when we most 
need to see clearly. And the mystics who 
ignore the whole problem, as they go off 
with their beatific visions, sometimes succeed 
in saving the beatific visions by a method 
which makes it impossible for them to help 
those who feel most the perplexity of the 
problem. Perhaps we can best analyze the 
situation and come to see some of the light 
which is ready to fall on the dark places by 
following the history of a hypothetical man 
who goes through the typical experiences 
as regards science and religion which the life 
and thought of oui* time are likely to bring 
about. It may be that no one man has ever 
passed through all these stages according to 
schedule, but many men have passed through 
some one of the typical experiences we shall 
discuss, and the whole situation will stand 
out best if we follow an imaginary man 
through the whole circuit of attitudes which 
are outstandingly characteristic of our time. 

I. The Period of Unquestioning Faith 

The boyhood memories of many a scien- 
tific man bring up a time of simple and 
104 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN^ 

beautiful and undisturbed faith. Mr. 
Alfred Noyes, in that sharply penetrating 
poem "The Old Sceptic," describes the com- 
ing back of such memories as these : 

I will go back to my home and look at the wayside 
flowers, 
And hear from the wayside cabins the sweet old 
hymns again, 
Where Christ holds out his arms in the quiet evening 
hours, 
And the light of the chapel porches broods on the 
peaceful lane. 

And there I shall hear men praying the deep old 
foolish prayers, 
And there I shall see once more the fond old faith 
confessed. 
And the strange old light on their faces who hear as 
a blind man hears — 
Come unto me, ye weary, and I will give you rest. 

I will go back and believe in the deep old foolish tales, 
And pray the sweet old prayers that I learned at 
my mother's knee. 
Where the Sabbath tolls its peace throughout the 
breathless mountain-vales, 
And the sunset's evening hymn hallows the listening 
sea. 

There are many homes yet to be found in the 

world where the sense of God and Christ is 

105 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

as sharp and clear as the sense of the father 
and mother, and a great series of homes Hke 
that which Burns describes with such simple 
eloquence in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" 
are to be found in widely scattered lands; 
and such homes form the golden chain which 
binds the world about the feet of God. The 
boy reared in a home like this breathes in 
piety as he breathes the air. He does not 
reach after belief as an attainment. He has 
it as a part of the very structure of his life. 
The Bible speaks to him with the high and 
awful authenticity of the voice of God even 
as it speaks with the winsome tenderness 
of the Man of Galilee. Prayer is a radiant 
reality which has been interpreted to him 
by the shining of his mother's face and the 
glow of deep communion which he has seen 
in his father's eyes. The life of the home 
is all shot through and transformed by the 
practical power of religion. It is a life as 
well as a creed, an experience as well as a 
belief. Mind and heart and will together are 
seeking to work out the divine behests. The 
church has a tender and beautiful sanctity, 
and worship has an alluring summons. The 
106 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

home interprets the church and the church 
inspires the home. All is simple and clear 
and nobly beautiful. The sunset glory and 
the verdure-clad hills and the power of 
Christ are all experienced and undisputed 
facts of life. The early years spent in such 
a home will give color to all the after time 
of a man's experience. He may journey far 
into paths of questioning and doubt, and 
may even come to dwell in places of positive 
unbelief, but he can never quite get away 
from the fact that he has known religion 
from within. The noblest skepticism of the 
nineteenth century was characterized by this 
regretful and pensive memory of the joys 
and hopes lost to the life for evermore. 

II. The Period When Science Seems 
TO Make Faith Impossible 

Forth from such a home as this the youth 
of eager and alert mind and buoyant heart 
goes to find his place in the intellectual life 
of the world. Often his home has been a 
sheltered spot, undisturbed by the mighty 
tempests beating out their fury upon the 
sea. The faith of his father and mother 
107 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

has been as simple and naive as his own. 
They have never felt the tug and the strain 
of the age's questioning. In their quiet 
cove, protected by mountains of strong be- 
lief, they have never felt the danger of the 
tempests raging upon the unresting sea. 
The son goes forth to be a sailor. He leaves 
the sheltered spot of his boyhood. He feels 
the wind upon his brow. His ship must 
meet the tempest. The old mountains are 
far away. He meets the first crisis of his 
life. To drop the figure, the keen-brained 
candid youth comes face to face with the 
positions of modern science. He learns to 
know the names and the work of the great 
scientific leaders of the nineteenth century, 
who gave out a new universe and a new set 
of formulas for life. He is introduced to a 
new appraisal of the facts of the world. He 
becomes familiar with the reign of law. The 
new thoughts appeal to his mind and fire his 
imagination. The vast universe to which 
scientific investigation introduces him, all 
held in the steel-like clasp of a great system 
of law, is a mental spectacle of solemn 
grandeur. There is an almost religious 
108 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

thrill in the thought of the far-lying worlds 
all subject to the control of inflexible and 
immutable law. If he looks through a tele- 
scope he sees more law-mastered worlds. If 
he looks through a microscope, and begins 
to investigate the infinitely small, here again 
is a universe in miniature held in the same 
inescapable grasp of law. Accompanying 
this study of the reign of law comes the 
knowledge of those vast generalizations 
which science has uttered in the attempt to 
explain the universe. Some form of the 
nebular hypothesis dazzles his imagination 
and compels his mental assent as an account 
of how the worlds came to be. In the cosmos 
he sees the far-lying grandeur of a great 
process of evolution. Coming to the earth 
itself, geology and biology speak out right 
confidently of an age-long process by means 
of which the world came to be what it is 
and the present forms of life developed 
from forms infinitely more simple. From 
movements in an inchoate universe of dif- 
fused substance which evolved into planets, 
on to the full completeness of civilized man, 
there is an unbroken process of evolution, 
109 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

the expression of a completely mastering 
system of law. The more he knows of vari- 
ous sciences, the more does this view become 
all-embracing. He is in a vast system with 
no place for breaks or gaps. The reign of 
law is the first and last word. And the 
process law is working out may be described 
by one magic word — evolution. 

As time goes on it becomes increasingly 
evident that this self -working system is not 
the friend of religion. The reign of law 
takes the place of the reign of God. Piety 
is still very beautiful, but it has no founda- 
tion in the system of things. The old boy- 
hood faith has all of its early charm, but it 
has ceased to command mental allegiance. 
At first the young man with his growing 
mind struggles against such conclusions. He 
repudiates their very suggestions. There 
must be some way to reconcile the reign of 
law and the reign of God. He tries to 
believe that at great crises in the life of the 
universe God stepped in and did something; 
but more and more he finds the gaps are 
filling up. The system is like some monster 
which devours everything in sight. The 
110 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

day comes when the student faces the fact 
that his scientific view of the universe is a 
complete thing with no breaks at all. He 
realizes bitterly the significance of the words 
of the brilliant skeptic who desired to take 
God to the edge of the universe and bow 
him out, with thanks for past services, be- 
cause he was no longer needed. 

While all this has been going on, and the 
young man has been coming into fuller and 
fuller knowledge of a system of law without 
any breaks anywhere, from another angle 
his faith has been weakened. He has become 
acquainted with the results of modern 
critical biblical scholarship. He had been 
brought up to believe in an inerrant Bible. 
He beholds it lying in fragments at his 
feet. He becomes interested in the processes 
of critical analysis of biblical documents and 
the frank appraisal of all their problems, 
and soon finds the conclusions of such inves- 
tigations compelling his allegiance. The 
Bible and the religion of which it is the 
literary exponent, become a part of a 
system of perfectly natural evolution. He 
has lost God out of the world of nature. He 
111 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

has lost him out of the Bible. The universe 
has become a vast mechanism with no room 
for God anywhere. All this produces heart- 
ache enough. The world has become very 
lonely since the Infinite Companion is dead. 
The system of law whose mighty majesty so 
attracted the imagination at first has lost its 
almost religious appeal. It has made the 
world less lovely, it has brought an autumn 
sense of loss in the place of the springtime 
of the soul. Mechanics have taken the place 
of personality in the universe, and the far- 
sighted thinker has . as his most dominant 
emotion a sense of loss. But every step has 
been taken candidly, and there is no retreat. 
Faith has become impossible, but intellectual 
candor is still on the throne. 

Of course many men do not go the whole 
length we have described. They build them- 
selves half-way houses in various spots; but 
they find it increasingly hard to live in the 
half-way house; and when they are profes- 
sors in universities they usually find that 
their most brilliant students refuse to stop at 
all at the half-way house, and insist on press- 
ing on to the logical conclusion. God is 
112 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

still worshiped in the half-way house, but if 
one takes the whole journey, the Deity is 
lost before the destination is reached. 

III. The Period When Moral and 

Religious Facts are Recognized 

BY THE Scientific Thinker 

As time passes, however, a dim gray 
comes to be seen in the darkness. It turns 
out, after all, that the final conclusion was 
not the last word. As Alice found it possible 
to go through the looking-glass, so the stu- 
dent finds that there is something beyond 
that materialistic interpretation of the uni- 
verse which makes it merely a water-tight 
system of inflexible laws. The new start 
comes with the recognition that all the facts 
have not been faced. If there is anything 
a scientific thinker makes a matter of pride, 
it is his candid appraisal of all the facts to 
be found anywhere. What hospitality is to 
the sheik in the desert open-minded welcome 
of new facts is to the scientist. So it is with 
a certain revulsion of feeling that he dis- 
covers the existence of a whole range of facts 
which he has been ignoring. The moral 
113 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

experience of humanity is as much a series 
of facts as are the defining characteristics 
of any form of hfe. A rehgious experience 
is as much a fact as a stone or a bug or a 
chemical reaction. Knowledge and its classi- 
fication are as stubbornly a part of experi- 
ence as any formation which confronts the 
eye of the geologist, and the interpretation 
in which the mind can rest must squarely 
meet and appraise and make room for all 
the facts of experience. Having set in some 
such fashion as this to rise no more, it 
seemed, the sun of religion comes within 
view again, having risen, it may be, to set no 
more. Men of science come to feel that thej'- 
must investigate the phenomena of the reli- 
gious life. With the same curious interest 
with which they might scrutinize an unusual 
insect they turn their eyes upon religion. In 
such a spirit has been done the type of work 
represented by the late Professor William 
James's Varieties of Religious Experience. 
The earth is ransacked for data. Question- 
naires are sent out which lead to more or 
less critical introspection. The secrets of 
the soul are put under the microscope and a 
114 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

brave attempt is made to unravel the mys- 
tery of the power of rehgion. All this 
represents one great gain. It offers to our 
young man, lost in the mazes of despairing 
knowledge, an opportunity to go back to a 
survey of the precious things which he has 
lost. It recognizes a series of facts which 
had been left out of account. It does not 
sneer at religion. It attempts to under- 
stand it. It does not deride conversion. It 
attempts to explain it. 

When the religious world sees the scien- 
tific world turning a respectful gaze upon 
religion there is much rejoicing. In some 
quarters there is an inclination to issue a 
thanksgiving proclamation. It is felt that 
at least a prayer meeting might be held to 
celebrate the event. That a great scientist 
should devote long periods of time to collect- 
ing and classifying the data of religious 
experience suggests the speedy arrival of 
the millennium. Before the issuing of the 
thanksgiving proclamation, however, it will 
be well for us to do a little close thinking. 
The facts of the case may not be altogether 
as encouraging as we had supposed. If a 
115 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

man gives their full significance to all the 
facts of religion, there is, indeed, a new start 
and a hope of a brighter day. But very 
often it happens that the scientific study of 
religion is merely an attempt to get all the 
religious phenomena so classified and inter- 
preted as to fit into the old water-tight 
system. It often happens that the sun has 
not risen after all, and that the light which 
played in the sky did not indicate any de- 
pendable or permanent illumination. The 
scientific psychology of religion may easily 
turn out to be a psychology for the explain- 
ing away of the very central sanctions of 
religion. As long as the worship of the 
water-tight system remains, there is really 
no hope. As long as the thinker must be 
loyal to the machine at whatever cost, there 
is no real gain. To admit that religious 
experiences have a place in a perfectly 
mechanical and impersonal interpretation of 
life is not to help on the cause of religion. 
It is to make religion impossible to those 
who accept the interpretation. To admit 
that belief in a certain series of events and 
persons and ideas has had a transforming 
116 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

effect on human lives does not aid in pro- 
ducing future transformations if in the same 
breath those events and persons and ideas 
are discounted and declared without genuine 
authenticity. The psychology of religion is 
often an attempt to keep religion without 
theology, which is very much like an attempt 
to keep circulation without any veins or 
arteries. So when our student takes up the 
study of religion in a scientific way he has 
found an opportunity, but he is by no means 
sure of making his escape. He has a won- 
derful system of pigeonholes, and he will be 
tempted to insist on getting the facts into 
the system. He may all too easily forget 
that it is his business to enlarge the system 
so that it may fit the facts. The really 
hopeful thing about this sort of investiga- 
tion is that the facts simply will not answer 
to any mechanical formula. If a man once 
genuinely faces the world of moral and 
religious experience, his world of mechanical 
thinking will begin to feel earthquake 
tremors. The very contact with the deeply 
personal experiences and transformations is 
like a series of electric shocks. A man may 
117 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

go on for a time engrossed in a dignified 
translation of personal experiences into 
interpersonal formulas, but it is always pos- 
sible that the abject futility of this sort of 
performance will dawn upon him. When 
that day comes there will be a sunrise indeed. 
Our sincere and eager student may reach 
the Great Divide in this fashion. He has 
spent some time in gathering data as regards 
religious experience. He has them classified 
in a clever mechanical fashion. Then he is 
brought to a sudden stop by this fact: The 
one thing which made religion transforming 
was a belief in a personal, supernatural God. 
The personal trust in the Divine was the 
point of strategy in the religious experience. 
Now he has explained the mechanics of that 
experience. He can produce every factor 
except the personal trust in the Divine. But 
without that trust a repetition of the ex- 
perience would be impossible. He has, 
therefore, explained religious experience by 
leaving out its one defining characteristic, 
and he has explained it in such a way as to 
make its repetition forever impossible to 
those who accept the explanation. The most 
118 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

important fact has slipped through his 
fingers and escaped. Now he is at the place 
of critical opportunity. Somehow he must 
find a larger synthesis. Somehow he must 
make a place for the Divine. How shall 
he do this without a break-up of his system? 
Can it be that the mechanical system is only 
a part of a larger whole? Can it be that 
this larger whole makes room for the very 
things he has so easily discarded? May God 
and freedom and personality have a place 
in the larger synthesis to which the candid 
thinker is driven ? 

IV. The Peeiod Where it is Seen that 
Science is a Brilliant Classifica- 
tion BUT Does Not Give Any 
Answer to the Ultimate 
Questions 

At this point our candid thinker is likely 
to meet one real difficulty. All his intel- 
lectual life has consisted of flights by means 
of the use of one wing. The other has no 
power because it has never been used. Our 
age worships the inductive method of reason- 
ing, and it is probably reserved for a later 
119 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

age to bring to its full service the too lightly 
sacrificed powers of deductive reasoning. 
So our pilgrim for the truth will probably 
use enlarged and modified induction in the 
perilous way to which he has now come. 
Everything hangs on his ability to see the 
meaning of one distinction. He has studied 
many a science ; he has accepted far-reaching 
scientific generalizations; now he must see 
that science is only a record of the way in 
which things happen. It never tells why 
they happen. Because day follows night no 
one supposes that one causes the other. The 
great philosophical fallacy of science is the 
supposition that, because one thing follows 
another, the thing which follows must be 
caused by the thing which goes before. 
Science is a catalogue of the uniformities of 
nature. It has never told anybody why they 
are uniform. It does not know. In a mov- 
ing picture the earlier films are not the 
ancestors of the later films. In a musical 
composition the earlier notes do not cause 
the later notes. In each case the cause is 
outside what appears in the series itself. 
Science is like a careful record of notes with 
120 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

no reference to the player. It is like a care- 
ful classification of the separate films with 
no reference to the cinematograph. Things 
happen in certain ways; science records the 
ways; but as to the great question of why 
they happen science has no answer to give. 
If our pilgrim after truth is able to see this 
fact, he is about to receive light which is 
light indeed. 

A question may be asked about this vast 
system. Is it self -running, or does it have a 
great personal ground back of itself? To 
answer this question our scientist must 
plunge into philosophy. He must become a 
student of epistemology. He must enter 
the world of metaphysics. As he journeys 
on, light increases. His great discovery will 
be that he has been using the instruments 
of the mind without ever critically inspect- 
ing them. He has never seen what is in- 
volved in his own rationality. The moment 
he begins to scrutinize the necessary impli- 
cations of rationality he finds personal in- 
tention and freedom and the discarded dis- 
tinctions of his youth knocking at the door 
again. As he goes on he discovers that a 
121 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

self -running mechanism as an explanation 
of the universe is one mass of contradictions. 
It would contradict every fundamental 
postulate of that process of knowing by 
which it is worked out. It would deny per- 
sonality and freedom and would make 
knowledge impossible. If there were such 
a universe as the mechanical system involves, 
we could never know it. On the other hand, 
a universe in which the free activity of a 
knowing mind is the fundamental fact makes 
room for everything in that process of uni- 
formities which science has made known to 
us, but explains them all by a Cause which 
expresses itself in these uniformities, and not 
by making these uniformities self-sustain- 
ing. 

If our thinker continues faithfully to pur- 
sue the paths of critical thought, he will come 
to see that science has its splendidly signifi- 
cant and important field in observing and 
classifying the uniformities of experience, 
but that it must leave their explanation to 
philosophy, and philosophy must call in a 
free and knowing person, the Master of Life. 
The new light focuses at one point. Law 
122 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

has been considered as something objective, 
something real, but it is seen that by itself a 
law is only a figure of speech. As has been 
wittily said, "A law cannot arrest any one — 
it takes a policeman." From the standpoint 
of that description of the way things happen, 
which is science, a law is simply a formula 
of uniformity. From the standpoint of 
philosophy, which asks the ultimate ques- 
tions, law is the name of the way in which 
God acts. The laws of nature are nothing 
but the abstract expression of the coherent 
and orderly method of the action of God. 
When all this is seen it is clear to our thinker 
that his system requires God, and that the 
last attitude of science, like that of religion, 
is one of faith. The only assurance for the 
continuity of life's uniformities is to be found 
in the character of God. But once allow 
divine personality to be the ultimate fact, 
and there is room for all those facts of moral 
experience which belong to ethics and those 
facts of history and revelation and the inner 
life and trust which belong to religion. The 
larger synthesis explains the physical uni- 
formities and leaves room for personal free- 
123 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

dom and all the transforming personal 
experiences. 

Now the student does not try to make his 
psychology of religion fit into mechanical 
molds. He knows that morals and religion 
belong to that aspect of experience which 
transcends the physical uniformities of life. 
When our thinker has set the bounds between 
science and philosophy, and has followed a 
critical philosophy to its ulitimate conclu- 
sions, he finds a foundation for all the faith 
of his childhood as well as for all he has 
learned in scientific study. 

V. The Ultimate World View 

Our pilgrim for truth has now found an 
intellectual destination. He sees that the 
task of the thinker is to find a view which 
will give to all a resting place of experience, 
and that mechanical views fail because ex- 
perience is not mechanical. He sees that 
you must begin all adequate thought with 
a thinker, because that is where experience 
begins. You cannot begin with things. You 
can find a place for them only as a part of 
the experience of living thinkers. He sees 
124 



A SCIENTIFIC MAN 

that in his days of doubt he had allowed 
the smaller part of life to devour the larger. 
He had used rationality to prove that the 
world had no place for rationality. Now he 
begins with an ultimate person as the neces- 
sary postulate of experience. He finds a 
place for all the mechanical uniformities of 
life as an expression of an orderly mind and 
a steadfast will, but he knows that God is 
greater than his system, and if there were 
sufficient motive God could change any of 
the uniformities. He is not a citizen in a 
world whose laws master him. He is king 
in a world whose laws are just his ways of 
acting. So in the crisis of moral history 
there is a place for the miracle. Wlien God 
does a thing in a different way you have a 
miracle. When he does it in his usual way 
you have the so-called order of nature. 
Really, it is all divine activity, both the mii- 
formity and that place of crisis, like the 
resurrection of Jesus, when the uniformity 
of method is ignored because of a great 
ethical and spiritual need. With the per- 
sonal view of the universe, whose orderliness 
is as steady as the character of God, but 
125 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

which does not have a dead and mechanical 
rigidity, there is room for freedom for man, 
for morals, for the tragedy of sin, for reh- 
gion, for a real revelation from God to men, 
for the incarnation of the Son of God, for 
the mighty deed of suffering rescue wrought 
by the Son of God on Calvary, for the resur- 
rection, for the new life, for immortality, and 
for a world view which includes all the uni- 
formities of science and all the facts of faith. 
Such a view is in complete accord with the 
justified conclusions of modern biblical 
scholarship. It avoids those extreme con- 
clusions which are the result of rationahstic 
presuppositions in the thinkers, but it 
candidly accepts those positions as regards 
date and authorship and unfolding revela- 
tion which have commended themselves to 
the sober and reverent scholarship of the 
world. It cannot rest content without a 
divine Christ. It must be sure of an actual 
redemption and a divine forgiveness, but it 
is very comfortable with a composite Hexa- 
teuch, and is ready to shake hands with a 
second Isaiah. 

Thus our pilgrim for truth has found a 
126 



A SCIEXTIFIC MAN 

Gibraltar at last. He remains a man of 
science, but he no longer confuses science 
with philosophy. He knows that the ulti- 
mate synthesis is a matter of philosophic 
appraisal, where the hidden communion of 
the saint and the formations of the geologist 
alike are treated with candor. He knows 
that God is the final postulate of the uni- 
formities of science as well as of the raptures 
of the mystic. He knows that science, ethics, 
and religion have a common platform in the 
personal interpretation of experience. He 
knows that ultimate forces are figures of 
speech and an ultimate Person a reality. The 
Lord God Almighty is the explanation of 
the uniformities of nature and the trans- 
formations of religion. 



127 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 



CHAPTER V 

THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

Orthodoxy may mean a number of dif- 
ferent things. It may mean a man's slavish 
assent to a formal code which he has never 
profoundly studied and of whose basis and 
implications he has no adequate conception. 
It may mean loyalty to a traditional point of 
view growing out of a profound sense of the 
value of the results of human experience as 
they have crystallized through the ages. It 
may mean adherence to certain standards 
through a nervous timidity which is afraid 
to venture on untried ground and has a 
special distrust of intellectual exploration. 
It may be the acceptance of recognized 
standards after a personal investigation and 
struggle which has tested every old position 
as if it were now for the first time offered 
to the world. It may be the intellectual 
rest of a man whose deepest intuitions and 
needs seem to him to be clearly met and 
satisfied by a particular interpretation of 
131 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

life which, though old, remains vital. Or it 
may be that a nmiiber of these different 
approaches to orthodoxy unite, making it 
acceptable to a particular thinker. You do 
not know much about a man when 3^ou 
merely know that he is orthodox. The 
orthodoxy must be traced down to its roots 
in his intellectual life. And even farther, 
it must be followed, as its roots twine in and 
out of his moral and spiritual life. When it 
is the expression of the whole life — the out- 
come of mental and moral and spiritual 
vitality — orthodoxy must be taken very 
seriously. The variety of the meanings of 
the word "orthodoxy" is not confined to the 
method by which a man becomes orthodox. 
It also includes the contents of his belief. 
What is orthodox in one age has often been 
heretical in the age before. What is ortho- 
dox in one scientific or philosophical or 
ecclesiastical group is often considered non- 
sense in another. Orthodoxy from this 
point of view may almost be defined as a 
fixed standard which is constantly changing. 
But, while the continued readjustments in 
human thinking warn us against too rigid a 
132 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

conception of orthodoxy, it remains true that 
as far as the Christian rehgion is concerned, 
there have been large reahns of thought as to 
which the cathohc faith has kept within cer- 
tain hnes in a remarkable way. We may 
claim a right to use the word ''orthodoxy" 
with some precision as describing Christian 
thought within these limits. The personality 
of God, the deity of Jesus Christ, the deadli- 
ness of sin, the redemption of men through 
the death of Christ, the new life which is 
the gift of the Son of God, the resurrection 
of Jesus, the assurance of a glorious im- 
mortality after death — these may be said to 
represent some of the conceptions to which 
the church has held through the ages, bat- 
tling for them, repudiating those who turned 
from them, stating them in the terms of 
different forms of culture and even of differ- 
ent civilizations, but always coming back to 
them, never having done with them, never 
outgrowing them. These are the corner 
stones of the orthodox faith. 

While all this is clear as regards the past 
it is not at all clear as regards the present. 
In the kaleidoscopic shiftings of present- 
133 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

day theological thought it is not at all easy 
to say what conceptions will come forth 
stamped with the approval of the consensus 
of Christian opinion. Everything is in solu- 
tion, and the process of crystallization does 
not seem to be particularly rapid. New 
methods of investigation, new conceptions 
of authority, new scientific postulates, new 
philosophical theses, new political and social 
movements, new voices of a hundred types 
crying in the wilderness of our modern life, 
give the careful thinker an amount of mate- 
rial to understand and master and appraise ; 
and at the same time so tend to rob him of 
any fundamental standards to use in the 
whole process of study and appraisal that his 
task may be said to be one of particular diffi- 
culty. It is true, however, that certain well- 
defined currents in the great unresting ocean 
of modern thought are not hard to discern. 
A man may fathom the spirit and direction 
of modernity, while he finds it impossible to 
speak with complete assurance and finahty 
about its goal. 

Before attempting some analysis of the 
general contents of the modern way of think- 
134 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

ing it will be well to remind ourselves a 
little more fully of the position and bear- 
ings of what we may call the Old Orthodoxy. 
For the sake of clearness let us make a 
division. The Old Orthodoxy had a certain 
conception of the Bible and of religious 
authority. It had a certain conception of 
the contents of the Christian faith. It will 
suit our purpose to speak of these separately. 
First, as to the matter of the Bible and 
religious authority. To the Old Orthodoxy 
the Bible was a correct, authentic, inerrant 
book. If there were mistakes in the Bible, 
they were the results of translation or copy- 
ing. The book itself, if you could get back 
to the originals, was faultless. It was the 
complete and correct and accurate expres- 
sion of the will of God. The human element 
in its composition was not emphasized. The 
author of a particular book was like a pen 
in the hand of the writer. God was the 
writer. He was the real author of the book. 
This view of the Bible was accompanied by 
a vivid sense of its imity. You could quote 
texts from any part of the Bible to substan- 
tiate a position you were trying to prove. 
135 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

They were all equally authoritative. God 
was the author of them all. When you had 
collected all that the Bible said on any sub- 
ject, from Genesis to Revelation, 3^ou could 
fairly say that you had the biblical teaching. 
This material was all treated as if it con- 
sisted of different utterances from one 
author, at one time, in one set of circmn- 
stances; every utterance as important as 
every other. The Bible was not thought to 
be like a continent with mountain ranges 
and plains, with hills and valleys, with 
heaven-piercing summits and deep ravines. 
It was one great level highland — the high- 
land of the Word of God. Bound up with 
this conception of the Bible was a certain 
conception of religious authority. If God 
had broken silence and given forth an iner- 
rant utterance, that utterance was the com- 
manding word to the children of men. It 
simply left no more to be said. It was a 
final program for life; a faultlessly correct 
reflection of the will and purpose of God. 
Because men had an infallibly correct utter- 
ance of the infallible God they had a final 
and unimpeachable authority. This con- 
136 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

ception required an inerrant Bible. If there 
was a mistake anywhere, there might be 
mistakes everywhere. The authenticity of 
anything in the Bible required the authen- 
ticity of everything. The belief in verbal 
inspiration was an attempt to buttress this 
position beyond a peradventure and a doubt. 
Besides having the general conception of 
the Bible and religious authority which we 
have attempted to reflect, the Old Ortho- 
doxy had a certain view of the contents of 
theology. It began as a matter of course 
with the personality of God. There was 
no need to argue about that. It bowed 
trembling before his awful holiness. It felt 
the heat of his flaming righteousness. Then 
it had a certain conception of sin. The dire 
tragedy of breaking with God's law was 
forever upon its conscience. Sin was not 
simply dreadful misfortune. It involved 
guilt. And the torturing sense of awful 
guilt fairly prostrated men. Sin made a 
terrible problem. Something must be done 
about it. Forgiveness could never be a mat- 
ter of course. The greatest, most perplex- 
ing problem in the world was this problem 
137 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of sin and how it could be forgiven. But 
something had been done about it. God had 
sent his own Son to deal with the problem. 
The Old Orthodoxy had most definite views 
of him. He was very God. He was not a 
high angelic messenger. He was God's own 
Son. It was right to worship him. He 
was God in the flesh. And the Son of God 
had dealt with the problem in a very definite 
way. He had died to save men. In his 
death he had made possible the forgiveness 
of sin. However one might explain it, the 
truth was that he took men's responsibilities 
upon himself. He bore their burden. He 
bent under the weight of their guilt. In his 
great suffering deed he achieved their peace. 
Then he had rent the veil which made the 
future dark. He had risen from the dead. 
His resurrection was the assurance and seal 
of men's immortality. The Old Orthodoxy 
had very definite views regarding the future. 
The moral significance of life was so great 
that upon it hung eternal issues. To accept 
Christ and his great sacrificial death was to 
inherit eternal life. To refuse him was to 
inherit eternal death. The Old Orthodoxy 
138 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

had a high standard of Kfe. The Christian 
was to trust Christ for everything, but he 
was to live as faithfully as if he had no trust 
but his own deeds. His life was to be the 
expression of the will of God. His obedi- 
ence was to be the complete devotion of his 
Hfe. 

At this point we call attention to a fact 
whose full significance will appear later in 
this discussion. The typical modern Chris- 
tian with an evangelical experience reading 
the above summary will have two feelings. 
The theology of the Old Orthodoxy will 
greatly appeal to him ; on the other hand, its 
conception of the Bible and of religious 
authority will appear quite impossible. He 
will feel that he could never accept it. 

Turning now to present-day currents of 
thought, what is the situation which we dis- 
cover? Again, for the sake of clearness, 
let us make a distinction: Modernity has a 
certain conception of the Bible and of reli- 
gious authority; and modernity has certain 
clearly defined tendencies as to the contents 
of its view of Christianity and of life. 

As to the Bible, the modern note is struck 
139 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

in the words of Coleridge, "The Bible finds 
me." The note of emphasis in the modern 
conception of the Bible is its vitality. Here 
is a book which treats life so prof oimdly that 
the serious-minded man simply must take 
account of it. The moral loftiness, the amaz- 
ing intellectual penetration, the spiritual 
cogency of the Bible forces it upon our at- 
tention. Its inner quality is such that we 
cannot make light of it. The book is the 
expression of the thought of a large number 
of different men. It reflects the outlook 
upon life of different periods, and even of 
different civilizations. To understand it in 
any adequate fashion you must be a 
patient student of history; and in quoting 
it you must carefully bear in mind not 
only the context in the book from which 
you quote, but also that larger context 
which is the environment of the writer 
of the book or the speaker of the words. 
There is a great human element in the 
book which must never be lost sight of. But, 
while all this is true, it is also true that 
no other literature rises to such heights. It 
bears the stamp of the divine upon it. The 
140 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

moral passion of the prophets, the spiritual 
insight of Hebrew poetry, the white and 
winning and majestic life of Jesus, the whole 
wonderful New Testament utterance, with 
its moral energy and spiritual power — all 
these speak in a language unshared by other 
books. They lift the Bible into a unique 
place. They make it proper to speak of the 
Bible as the Book of God. Corresponding 
to this conception of the Bible is a certain 
conception of religious authority. The 
authoritative is the vital. That which com- 
pels a man's mind, masters his conscience, 
and energizes his will has a kind of authen- 
ticity which is more commanding than any 
mere technical correctness or verbal iner- 
rancy. The Bible has this high commanding 
vitality. It may contain mistakes. It does 
contain mistakes. Certain parts of the Bible 
may reflect the thought of people on the way 
to the truth rather than the thought of 
people who have arrived at the truth. This, 
indeed, we must affirm of the Bible. Even 
New Testament writers may not always see 
all the implications of the great principles 
they are enunciating. Even they may some- 
141 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

times be limited, rather than helped, by the 
thought forms in which they must utter their 
message. But when all this is frankly and 
fully admitted it remains true that the Bible 
is alone among books in its power to rouse 
the conscience. It is alone among books in 
the loftiness of its conception of God. It 
has a solitary splendor in the morally crea- 
tive quality of its message. It authenticates 
itself as the bearer of God's own message 
to men by its perennial seizure of man's mind 
and conscience and heart; its perpetual 
energizing of the human will; its unabated 
power to bring to men a message which is 
morally creative. When all mechanical pro- 
tections have been cast aside, when all merely 
formal defenses have been repudiated, the 
Bible stands forth strong in its inherent 
qualities and vindicates its authority as a 
vital guide to the heart of God and to the 
doing of God's will. 

Turning from the modern conception of 
the Bible and of religious authority, we come 
to the difficult matter of the theological con- 
tents of modernity. In this realm general- 
izations must be made with care ; and it must 
142 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

be kept in mind that it is a sketch of a situa- 
tion at large, and not an analysis of the 
position of some individual present-day 
thinker, which is being attempted. 

The outstanding contrast between mo- 
dernity and the Old Orthodoxy begins in the 
way in which sin is viewed. The haunting 
sense of the deadliness of personal trans- 
gression is scarcely to be found in a typical 
modern thinker in whose thought processes 
the Zeitgeist has full sway. There is much 
consciousness of evil to be remedied. There 
is much passionate eagerness to right the 
wrong of the world. But the emphasis is 
rather on evil as a result of environment 
than on evil as a result of personal intention. 
Sin has become less a personal tragedy, less 
a matter of dire personal guilt, and more 
an unfortunate social phenomenon. It is 
less a matter of conscience and more a matter 
of social statistics. It is conceived as so much 
a matter of confusion and ignorance, so 
much the deposit of heredity and unpromis- 
ing environment, that along these lines it 
seems easiest to think about it. It is easier, 
to put it bluntly, to think of a man as a 
143 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

moral ignoramus, or as a victim, than as a 
sinner. The sharp ethical perception of the 
personal meaning of sin, then, has in the 
main departed from modernity. Naturally 
in the wake of this certain results follow. 
Without a sense of sin so dreadful that the 
consciousness of guilt fairly paralyzes 
human endeavor, the emphasis of the Old 
Orthodoxy on the death of Christ seems 
strangely unreal and overwrought. JNIoder- 
nity can understand the expression of the 
Father's love in noble self -giving, even unto 
death ; it can understand the creative potency 
of this great revelation of the love of God, 
but Calvary as the deed of a Sin-Bearer, 
Calvary as a personal act of taking up the 
responsibilities of sinful men, Calvarj^ as 
expiation — to the modern view it is simply 
inexplicable. It seems to consist of words 
without meaning. It is convicted of un- 
reality. Then it is easy for modernity to 
feel that it has no gift for answering meta- 
physical questions about the person of 
Christ. If it had so poignant and terrible 
a conception of sin that only the very Son of 
God could deal with the problem it might be 
144 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

forced into making assertions, with vast 
metaphysical imphcations, about the person 
of Jesus. As it is, it stands full of awe and 
reverence before the Man of Galilee, it 
listens to his teachings, it strives to imbibe 
the spirit of his life, it learns from him the 
meaning of the Fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man, and it goes out to its 
tasks, its mind preoccupied by this revela- 
tion. Modernity sounds no great and de- 
cided note about the Deity of Jesus. And 
the fundamental reason is not that it has 
metaphysical difficulties. The fundamental 
reason is that the modernist has a view of 
life which does not absolutely require a 
divine Christ. 

The most attractive phases of modernity 
have to do with its sense of the immanence 
of God and its social passion. Modernity 
may not be very clear as to all the implica- 
tions of its theism (indeed, sometimes the 
laws of nature may look so frowningly 
strong that it seems as if this theism is en- 
dangered), but at least — without a clearly 
thought out system — it is sure that God is 
the Infinitely Near. He is the present 
145 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

source of all the activity of the world. We 
do not need to reach out to find him. He is 
always here. Sometimes this conception of 
the immanence of God is expressed in such 
a way that it is difficult to call it anything 
but pantheism, but its warming and vivify- 
ing quality cannot be denied. Then the 
social passion of modernity is a lofty and 
beautiful thing. It believes in brotherhood. 
It seriously sets about getting men to hve 
as brothers should. It is ready to fight the 
good fight of freeing modern life from 
its blasting evils. Cleansed countries and 
cleansed cities and cleansed homes are its 
goal. It believes that the kingdom of God 
is the kingdom of good here and now, and 
right loyally it strives to bring it in. 

Now, the modern man with a typical 
evangelical experience has two feelings as he 
faces modernity. The first has to do with 
its theology. Leaving out of account its 
view of the immanence of God and its social 
passion, of which we will speak later, he is 
not attracted by its theological conceptions. 
Its view of sin seems to him to lack moral 
realism. It does not take account of the 
146 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

darkest and direst facts of life. His ex- 
perience seems to go to depths of need of 
which modernity has no apprehension. Its 
conception of Calvary is beautiful, and it is 
true, but it is not all the truth and it is not 
the most important part of the truth. This 
modern man with an evangehcal experience 
knows that the deepest meaning of Calvary 
to him is its answer to the need of a con- 
science passionately awake. The words 
"sin-bearer" and "expiation" are great words 
to him. The very center of his hope, the 
creative power in his hfe, is the fact that 
Christ has borne his sins and made possible 
his redemption. Modernity leaves the Cross 
beautiful, poetic, and impotent in the pres- 
ence of life's supremest moral demand; the 
outcry of a conscience unappeased. Then the 
modern man with an evangehcal experience 
is not contented with the Christ modernity 
has to offer him. He recognizes the truth of 
much it has to say. He is glad to receive 
many an illuminating word, but here again 
he misses the word he most needs. In the 
crucial need of his life one thing he must be 
sure of: he must be sure that Jesus is God. 
147 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

Life's tragic problem to him is of such a 
character that it cannot be solved by prophet, 
priest, or poet. It can be solved only by 
the Son of God. So this man, with his 
recoil from the blackness of sin, with his 
hope through the Son of God, who has died 
to make possible the forgiveness of his sins, 
feels that the modernist would ask him to 
live in a smaller world; a world with a less 
candid treatment of the facts of life, and a 
world with the deepest craving of his hfe 
unmet and the outcry of an awakened con- 
science after peace unsatisfied. 

On the other hand, when our modern man 
with an evangelical experience reads whdt 
modernitj^ has to say about the Bible and the 
source of religious authorit}^ he is much at- 
tracted by it. To him the Bible is authorita- 
tive because of its inlierent power of moral 
mastery. To him it is compelling because it 
meets the deepest outreach of his life as does 
no other book in all the world. Like the 
modernist, he is undisturbed by changes of 
view as to date and authorship. Like the 
modernist, he is quite easj^ in the presence of 
the fact of the human elements in the Bible, 
148 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

and he is eager to use the Scriptures with 
due sense of their historic background and 
the actual standpoint of each author. Like 
the modernist, he feels that, when all conces- 
sions have been made, the uniqueness and 
the moral and spiritual power of the Eible 
remain. He finds himself in general sym- 
pathy with the modernist conception of the 
Bible and religious authority. He finds 
himself dissatisfied with the central postu- 
lates of modernity as to theology. Now, we 
have already seen that this modern man with 
an evangelical experience finds himself 
drawn to the theological conceptions of the 
Old Orthodoxy and repudiating its concep- 
tions of the Bible and of religious authority. 
It really seems that if he could combine the 
modern conception of the Bible and reli- 
gious certainty with the central theological 
postulates of the Old Orthodoxy he would 
find himself satisfied. This, indeed, is the 
goal of our discussion. This is just what is 
necessary for us to do. And this we venture 
to denominate the New Orthodoxy. 

It is no mere artificial combining of parts 
of two discordant points of view for which 
149 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

we plead. The fact is that the modem con- 
ception of religious authority supports the 
central theological postulates of the Old 
Orthodoxy and will ultimately be seen to 
demand them. The pragmatists tell us that 
the point of view which proves creative, 
which is necessary to the growth and de- 
velopment of life, may be accepted. The 
thing which the growing life of the race 
must have in order to its growth it has a 
right to have. That very need is proof of 
the validity of the thing needed. The man 
of the New Orthodoxy replies: "Very well. 
I accept that principle, and I point out some 
applications of it which do not seem to have 
occurred to you. The conception of sin as 
a terrible matter of personal intention and 
the haunting sense of its dire guilt are at the 
root of all adequate morals. The view of 
the cross as a great divine deed of expiation 
answers the awakened conscience as nothing 
else does, and frees and energizes the man 
who accepts it for a full and victorious man- 
hood. The belief that Jesus Christ was very 
God gives a potency to the redemptive deed 
without which it cannot do its full work. 
150 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

These beliefs as to the deadliness of sin, as 
to the deed which makes forgiveness pos- 
sible, as to the deity of Jesus Christ, com- 
bine into a group of morally creative con- 
ceptions unparalleled in human thought." 
So pragmatism becomes one of the chief 
supports of orthodoxy. In truth, with a 
belief in a vital, as distinguished from a 
mechanical, authority, we come to a new 
emphasis on the theological contents of the 
Old Orthodoxy. It is just because the Bible 
sounds such a dire and terrible note in its 
conception of sin, just because it presents 
Jesus as the Son of God, just because it 
sees in the cross the deed of a great Sin- 
bearer, that it becomes finally authoritative 
to us; because it deals adequately with sin, 
and presents us with a victorious Saviour and 
a deed on the cross which sets the conscience 
at rest, that it is vindicated to us as the Book 
of God. 

So the New Orthodoxy is fearlessly 
modern in its view of the Bible and of reli- 
gious authority. It welcomes all new light 
from critical scholarship. It repudiates 
mechanical and lifeless views of authority. 
151 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

With a conscience awake it receives peace 
from God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 
and in that experience the Bible becomes 
authoritative. The Bible is eternally satis- 
fying because it is the Book of Redemption. 
The New Orthodoxy builds its theology 
about a conception of sin as heavy with a 
sense of its horrible guilt as any theology of 
the past; it rests in a nobly spiritual inter- 
pretation of the cross, free from crass and 
mechanical conceptions of commercial ex- 
change, to be sure, but unflinching in its 
insistence that the cross is the deed of a Sin- 
bearer who made possible the forgiveness 
of sins. It looks up, and is forever chal- 
lenged by its conception of Jesus : very God 
as well as very man, the Son of God who 
died for us, Lord of all forever. Then the 
New Orthodoxy finds a place for all that is 
deeply real in the theological conceptions of 
modernity, while repudiating its errors. It 
welcomes the thought of the immanence of 
God. Its God is the infinitely near, but so 
interpreted as to avert completely the dis- 
integrating consequences of pantheism. It 
accepts the social passion and goes out to 
152 



THE NEW ORTHODOXY 

work for the kingdom of God, cleansing 
modern life, mastering commerce, politics, 
social life, and home life in the name of 
Christ. Thus the New Orthodoxy arrives 
at an organism of belief and a program of 
activity. It is no matter of intellectual 
patchwork, but the living union of those 
truths which belong together and will set us 
free and energize us for the great tasks of 
the world. The Old Orthodoxy had a place 
of definite inadequacy in its view of the 
Bible and religious authority. Modernity 
is inadequate in its conception of sin, of the 
cross, and the person of Christ. The New 
Orthodoxy, with a modern and vital concep- 
tion of the Bible, with a morally adequate 
conception of sin, of salvation, and of Jesus, 
the Son of God, can gird itself as a strong 
man to run a race. It is able to face the 
future unafraid. 



153 



BUSHNELL AND "THE 
VICARIOUS SACRIFICE" 



CHAPTER VI 

BUSHNELL AND "THE VICARIOUS 
SACRIFICE" 

I 

Horace Bushnell was born in Connect- 
icut in 1802. He died in 1876. He was 
reared in the Congregational Church, but his 
mother had been a member of the Episcopal 
Church, and his father had learned Arminian 
views from his mother and objected to the 
rigid Calvinism delivered where he lived. 
So religiously varied currents met in Horace 
Bushnell. His father had two occupations 
— conducting a factory and a farm. Bush- 
nell worked in connection with both. His 
heredity and environment seemed to com- 
bine to preclude narrowness and provincial- 
ism. Diversity came in upon him in life and 
thought. His mother was a woman by whom 
duty was made authoritative without being 
hateful, and who made religion felt as a 
reality without making it a constant topic 
of conversation. The home was a New 
157 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

England home and more ; and in a sense it 
was prophetic of Bushnell, who was to be a 
New England man, and far more than that. 
Conscience, and a practical relation to life, 
with a compelling conviction in the things of 
religion, are three New England character- 
istics. These things were true, but not the 
distinctive, characteristics of Bushnell. The 
deep vein of mysticism and the versatility of 
his thought and life in combination with the 
other qualities, made Bushnell what he was. 
At twenty-one he entered Yale College. 
After a course where he was felt as a leader 
he graduated. Then he studied law and 
became a tutor in the college. He had been 
religious as a boy, but a skeptical period 
came and an intense revival movement in 
the college found him intellectually imsym- 
pathetic. A group of young men who ad- 
mired him stood aloof from the movement. 
This was more than Bushnell could bear. 
He listened to the demands of his conscience 
and his heart and opened himself to the re- 
vival influences. How his doubts were dealt 
with may be seen in his own words. . Speak- 
ing of the Trinity he said: "I am glad I 
158 



BUSHNELL 

have a heart as well as a head. My heart 
wants the Father, my heart wants the Son, 
my heart wants the Holy Ghost — and one 
just as much as the other." It was the 
appeal to experience which was to underlie 
much of his thinking and hfe. He entered 
the divinity school and in 1833 was invited 
to become pastor of the North Church in 
Hartford, Connecticut, where all his active 
ministerial life was spent. His pastorate 
entered into the very life of Hartford. The 
park bearing his name is one evidence of how 
deeply he impressed the city. His influence 
entered into the fiber of the manhood of the 
city, inspired it in educational ideals and 
even in commercial activity. He became 
Hartford's first citizen. After hearing him 
on Sunday, we are told, men would say, 
"I've heard a great sermon and I'm going 
to make my week mean something!" His 
relation to his own church is suggested by 
the unity with which it stood by him through 
the fierce theological controversies which 
raged about him, finally withdrawing from 
the Concession to protect him and express 
its loyalty to him. When his divergence 
159 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

from opinions almost universally held be- 
came understood the attack began which 
continued a running fire for years. Vain 
attempts were made again and again to 
bring him to trial. The Congregational 
polity was in his favor. Besides, Bushnell 
was not the sort of man to try for heresy; 
there was such a massive Christian quality 
about him that New England common sense 
held the heresy-hunters in check. He was 
interested in everything. He planned roads, 
could not pass over a stream without calcu- 
lating its water power, had a passion for 
nature, organized a musical society when at 
Yale, was practical, poetic, virile, alive to 
the finger tips. Through all this versatile 
life the ring of conscience sounds clear, and 
under it there heaved the great tidal move- 
ment of a deep personal religious life. He 
was forever original. Though a reader, he 
was not in any technical sense a scholar. 
There was too much going on inside his own 
mind for that. He kept problems hanging 
on pegs, as he said, until he could get to 
them. Such eagerness and such vitality were 
his that to the last he was planning new 
160 



BUSHNELL 

and large enterprises of thought. If he was 
still alive, he would be publishing a book 
this year to startle men out of intellectual 
sluggishness, partly agreeing with the spirit 
of the time, as easily disagreeing with it; 
moving with an ahnost airy freedom from 
earth's control, but with a very solid strength 
for a man who has wings. His thinking was 
a preacher's thinking, his theology was a 
preacher's theology. The young men who 
listened to him in Hartford found in him a 
leader. Through his books he has been the 
master of many, a sort of theological pastor, 
and his preaching rooted in his experience. 
Skillful and brilliant as he was, the secret of 
his power was not in these things, except as 
they expressed the spiritual realities which 
he had verified in his own life. Great as 
he was a thinker, he was greater as a 
seer. His style at times is dazzlingly bril- 
liant. Heaven and earth are laid under 
tribute, and one is sometimes almost be- 
wildered bj^ the play of light, the gleam of 
figure, the sweep of movement, and the qual- 
ity of noble phrase. Yet it is not always 
an easy style to read, and it is not always 
161 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

just lucid. Bushnell's originality is his 
weakness, as well as his strength, here as 
elsewhere. He takes liberties with words. 
To a generation taught by Matthew Arnold 
some of his constructions are awkward. 
Perhaps it would be too much to expect a 
volcano to have regard to literary chastity. 
There is something in BushnelFs style which 
suggests the paintings of Church, with their 
daring brilliancy of color. The comparison 
may not be fair to Bushnell, but he has 
something of the fault of Church. All is, 
of course, redeemed by a wealth of thought 
which completely saves his style from being 
splendid pyrotechnics. Its best defense 
would be to say that it was an expression of 
the man. 

The last years of Bushnell's life were a 
battle with disease. A manly battle it was, 
and they were not years of idleness. They 
were filled with work as he was able, and the 
richness of his nearness to God glowed over 
them. The theological controversies were 
healed not by agreement but by a growing 
respect and reverence for the man. In the 
day of his passing one of America's most 
162 



BUSHNELL 

distinct and notable minds was lost to this 
world's activities. When we think of the 
largely built men of his century, we do not 
hesitate to name him among them. 

II 

The New England theology was a thing 
of wonderful logical acumen, but it tended 
to reduce theology to the terms of formal 
logic. In one way Browning's "Tertimn 
Quid" in The Ring and the Book might 
represent its fatal tendency to miss reality 
in the pursuit of logical correctness. And 
the logic became not merely formal and 
mechanical but cold, heartless, even cruel. 
Some of its assertions were unethical enough 
unless measured by some supramundane 
standard of ethics where two and two 
morally do not make four. The reaction 
from this came about in two ways. First 
there was the Unitarian movement. It had 
several aspects. There was the moral aspect. 
Trying to get away from an immoral God, 
it gave itself to negations. It insisted and 
reinsisted that certain cruel things which 
theology had asserted could not be true of 
163 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

God. In many of its negations it was cor- 
rect enough, and, doubtless, many were 
driven into Unitarianism by the false asser- 
tions of a mistaken orthodoxy. Then there 
was its theological aspect. It more and 
more reacted so as to leave Christ quite com- 
pletely without divinity. Beginning with a 
lofty and spiritual sort of Arianism, by the 
very law of its nature it lowered and lowered 
its estimate of Christ. A distrust of the 
potency of the supernatural led toward the 
repudiation of miracles. Theologically, 
Unitarianism tended to drift into a modified 
skepticism. Then there was the aesthetic 
side. It represented religion without ethical 
cost. It created piety without the echo of 
Mount Sinai thundering through it. A 
natural outcome of this aspect is seen later 
in the philosophy of Emerson and the dilet- 
tante piety of "Christian Science." Begin- 
ning as a party of protest, Unitarianism 
possessed great and noble leaders. In many 
details it was right. But almost every pro- 
found tendency promised less and less noble 
things in days to come. The other reaction 
from the older New England theology was 
164 



BUSHNELL 

in the direction of a modified Calvinism. 
Here the governmental theory of the atone- 
ment found play. But it was an attempt 
to heal with more logic the wounds made by 
logic. The syllogism still sat grandly on the 
throne. Whatever may be thought of it as 
an intellectual achievement, the result did 
not save the situation. The modified Cal- 
vinism had taken up logic and by its logic 
it was to perish. In such a theological world 
Bushnell was trained. His whole theological 
life was a reaction from the reign of formal 
logic. The heart must be heard. Life must 
speak. Christian thinking must be made 
vital. We will best approach his work from 
the standpoint of his theory of language. 
To him language was not a vehicle of abso- 
lutely correct speech; it was a symbol, a 
suggestion. If this were true, it was a great 
and destructive bomb thrown into the camp 
of the formal logicians. For, if words are 
but symbols, how can they be used in closely 
reasoned demonstrations ? Who would think 
of making a syllogism of metaphors ? Words 
are a means of contact with reality through 
a sort of splendid suggestion, but you must 
165 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

not try to tie them down to the niceties of 
absolute accuracy. Then nature was a great 
symbol. Bushnell was quite Wordsworthian 
in his feeling about nature. It was just 
another set of words, a symbol of the highest 
realities of life. Coming in this attitude to 
the problems of theology, he had a wonder- 
ful exegetical freedom. He really did not 
need the help of modern critical scholarship ; 
his theory of language saved him in every 
awkward situation. Regarding the Trinity 
he at first expressed himself in quite Sabel- 
lian forms. He had a passion for the unity 
of God like that of Unitarians. One God 
with three modes of expression might pretty 
well describe the impression made by his 
early writing about the Trinity. The more 
he thought over the problem the more he 
tended to move toward orthodoxy. He 
pushed the distinctions in the Godhead 
farther and farther back until finally he 
spoke of God as "eternally threeing him- 
self." Perhaps this sounds more nearly 
orthodox than it is, for to the last Bushnell 
emphasized the threefold aspect as necessary 
in regard to relations with the finite rather 
166 



BUSHNELL 

than inherently essential to the life of the 
Godhead. His study of the supernatural 
recognized a world of nature, with its 
mechanical laws, and a supernatural world 
including all persons — man as well as God 
— but he conceived of it all as a unity with 
God as ruler. The contention that man was 
supernatural tended to be of the greatest 
help to men beginning to be afraid of the 
laws of nature, and his insistence that all 
made a unity ruled by God was right and 
true. If he had seen that even the laws 
of nature are just God's ways of doing 
things, he would have come to the very heart 
of the problem. His work on Christian 
Nurture, of more practical than theological 
value, insisted that children in Christian 
homes should be brought up as belonging to 
God and trained as members of his King- 
dom. This seems like a commonplace now, 
but the practical contention, valuable as it 
was, had a theological presupposition which 
needs careful scrutiny. A certain kind of 
emphasis on training needs to be made with 
clear understanding of the meaning of per- 
sonahty and personal choice. Wlien Bush- 
167 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

nell spoke of Christ he usually used terms 
in which the divinity swallowed up the 
humanity. He was sure of God in Christ. 
The other side of the problem perhaps 
scarcely occurred to him. 

This hasty sketch of his work as a Chris- 
tian thinker, omitting The Vicarious Sacri- 
fice, which will be referred to immediately, 
does not reveal what was most characteristic 
and valuable in his theological method. He 
was always expressing his own Christian ex- 
perience, or what he felt necessary to protect 
it. It was the theological foundation for a 
life he wanted to get. He was ready to 
consider and reconsider his theology in the 
light of his growing Christian life. Theology 
was to be not merely crystallized Christian 
experience ; it was to be Christian experience 
living and thrilling in beautiful symbols, 
forever suggesting and leading the soul to 
the sanctuaries of Christian reality itself. 

Ill 

The first volume of The Vicarious Sacri- 
fice was written during the Civil War. The 
book itself has a great throb of battle in it. 
168 



BUSHNELL 

But it is no petty warfare, with intellectual 
raid and plunder; it is a great, noble battle, 
a Gettysburg, with far-flung lines and lof- 
tiest heroism. The book has its necessary 
polemic, but its whole tone is lofty. 
Here Bushnell's repudiation of the the- 
ology of formal logic is expressed at white 
heat. The central thing about the Chris- 
tian faith was salvation. The central thing 
must be expressed in terms of life. It must 
not be even wonderfully articulated bones, 
it must be flesh and blood and nerves. Here 
theology must be translated into heart 
throbs. So he set to work upon the great 
task, to discuss salvation in terms of life. 
And the great principle, the positive foun- 
dation for all the work, was the necessity 
inherent in love to get under whatever bur- 
den of sorrow and pain and sin affects those 
loved; in suffering sympathy to enter into 
the very meaning of their woe; to bare its 
own life to the blasts which beat upon them ; 
to go forth to rescue at whatever cost, nay, 
with a certain passionate eagerness for the 
cost of sorrowful experience which will 
work rescue. This is the principle of 
169 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

vicarious sacrifice inherent in love. It is a 
universal principle. It is true of God the 
Father, it is true of the Holy Ghost, it is 
true of the good angels, it is true of all 
redeemed souls. When love is love it has 
no other choice than to go forth under any 
burden of pain for the helping of those for 
whom love yearns. This is the motive of 
salvation. This is the spiritual meaning of 
the cross. It is an eternal meaning. There 
was a cross in the heart of God from eternity. 
Christ revealed it on Calvary. The inherent 
obligation of God's life required this sacri- 
fice. He was not any better than he ought 
to be; he was just completely loyal to the 
meaning of his own love. But this quality 
of willingness to suffer for the rescue of 
men becomes itself a moral power, becomes 
itself a rescue when it is expressed in terms 
of human life. The vicarious principle in 
the heart of God, crystallized into action, 
becomes the moral power which conquers 
and renovates the sinner. Christ came to 
be this moral power — not to be simply an 
example, not to be simply an influence, but 
to be a power, the power of love in the 
170 



BUSHNELL 

abandon of suffering to rescue from sin. 
His work as a healer gives a keynote to his 
ministry. He was always healing bodies, 
it was a parable of his work as a healer of 
souls. No technical change in legal status 
would satisfy him ; he must see sin conquered 
— slain — in man, and his work was so to 
become a moral power that the very root 
motives in men's lives would be seized and 
held for God. How did he do it ? By every- 
thing about him. By life and death all 
together. He did not come to die; he died 
because he was here and the situation in 
which he found himself required death. You 
can follow his life from the start, however, 
and, full of wonder as it is, full of heartbreak 
as his death is, the pivotal place in his prac- 
tically becoming a moral power was at the 
resurrection. That showed who he was. The 
life and death of a splendid man could not 
become the required moral power, but the 
life and death of One revealed by the resur- 
rection to be God in human life breaks right 
into the heart and becomes the power of 
God unto salvation. View life, and words, 
and works, and death from this high vantage 
171 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

ground, and all leaps witli significance. 
The eternal heartbreak in the life of God 
has got itself expressed. Thus he loved, thus 
he suffered ; thus he entered the very burden 
of the world's woeful sin. Thus the very 
moral potency of God is set loose in human 
life. Thus does Christ become the moral 
power of God in rescuing men from sin. 

But now we are beset by the hosts of the 
logicians. What becomes of the justice of 
God in this view? The question rings out 
with the charge of the enemy. Right 
eagerly Bushnell girds himself for the fray. 
Let us get to the root of the matter, he says, 
in effect. This whole question of justice 
must be scrutinized, for justice is not the 
fundamental thing in God. Justice is a 
quality of God in the practical exigencies 
of government. There is a deeper thing. It 
is the very ideal law of right, existing before 
government; the law in fundamental one- 
ness with which God is what he is. Justice 
must be treated with respect, but this funda- 
mental law must be satisfied. And what is 
vicarious sacrifice, what is love taking up the 
burden, the woe, the whole tragedy of sin 
172 



BUSHNELL 

upon its own feeling and life, in rescuing 
agony, but the very expression of this funda- 
mental law? This is the law before govern- 
ment. It is the deepest thing we can touch; 
and instead of being an obstacle in the way, 
it causes the rescue of men by the moral 
power of vicarious sacrifice. But what about 
the antagonism between justice and mercy? 
There is no antagonism. They work to- 
gether. Justice holds the evil man in the 
chains of his evil until a change in his life 
lifts him out of the category where retribu- 
tive causes work. There is no let-up in this. 
It is unflinching. Mercy finds a way to 
work in the man a change which lifts him 
out of the range of the retributive causes 
of life. Justice is steady, and works as 
another force in the very field where mercy 
works. Like two forces in nature, they may 
seem to contain a formal contradiction but 
really are cooperative in the whole process. 
But what about the law's high demand upon 
life? Christ honors it in every way. He 
restores men to obedience to it. He restores 
it to its place of power. He obeys it him- 
self, and he dies in loyalty to it. Christ is 
173 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

the great supporter and uplifter of the law. 
As to legal enforcement, there is no failure. 
We may almost say that a new sternness 
comes to light in Christ. He first announced 
the doctrine of eternal punishment, and he 
announced it in the most appalling forms of 
speech. And he announced the judgment. 
His words flame with moral fire. All this 
perfectly protects legal enforcements. As to 
God's rectoral honor, that, too, is protected. 
For Christ as God stepped aside from no 
burden laid upon the race by the curse of 
sin. He entered into the very meaning of 
the curse. Under its pressure he so lived 
and wrought and died as to become the 
world's supreme moral power. A work so 
wrought can never dishonor God as a ruler. 
So, not by mechanical or commercial substi- 
tution but by the moral power of his 
vicarious sacrifice, Christ works out our sal- 
vation. It is a process wrought in men. It 
is not something done for them in which they 
have no part. And what is their part? It 
is the consent of faith. By faith they so 
open their lives to this moral power that it 
does its work in them. Justification by 
174 



BUSHNELL 

faith is not a new legal status; it is a new 
life. The sinner is actually made into a new 
creature ; but this new life constantly comes 
from the power of Christ. The man all the 
while is being worked upon. And this con- 
stant derivation of power from Christ 
through faith is justification. 

Just now another attack comes sweeping 
before the reader. The guns thunder with 
the sacrificial ammunition of the Old Testa- 
ment. Bushnell proceeds, as he believes, to 
capture the guns and to turn them upon the 
enemy. What was the meaning of the whole 
sacrificial system of the Old Testament? 
Why, hke words themselves, it was a great 
symbol, and it was finally to teach not legal 
cleansing but moral cleansing. Ceremonial 
cleansing was finally to uplift cleansing of 
life. The whole system was a parable of 
purification. And what does all this mean 
but that the whole system was a preparation 
for the viewing of Christ's work as a real 
purification, as a moral power? 

Now, after the manner of ancient battles, 
the fighting along the line ceases and some 
giant words come up to do single combat. 
175 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER . 

There are three GoHaths of them: Atone- 
ment, Propitiation, and Expiation. Of these 
Expiation is a Philistine indeed and Bush- 
nell goes forth to his slaying. As a matter 
of fact, we are told, expiation is no biblical 
conception at all. It is a heathen concep- 
tion grafted on the Bible and grafted on the 
gospel. Expiation spells itself out in terms 
of unutterable cruelty. It is a heartless 
conception from the classics. It has no home 
in the Bible nor in our faith. Expiation 
slain, atonement and propitiation are ex- 
plained. They have been fighting under the 
wrong colors. All we need is to understand 
them. Atonement is at-one-ment — the real, 
not the legal, harmonizing of man and God. 
And how is this done except by the power 
of Christ making the man a new creature? 
Propitiation is the new attitude God can 
have toward this changed, renewed man. 
The essential change is in the man. This 
makes possible a new relation of God to him, 
and this essential change is wrought by the 
moral power of Christ. But there is some- 
thing left to be done. Christ's great sacri- 
fice is to become a moral power in our lives 
176 



BUSHNELL 

and so save us from sin, but he does not 
become a moral power by our calling him 
that. He does not become a moral power 
by our thinking of him as that, or by our 
trusting him as that. In fact, we must for- 
get all about his being a moral power, or he 
cannot be the greatest power at all. Our 
very self -consciousness, in thinking of him 
as a moral power, is in danger of preventing 
his becoming so. How is this dilemma to be 
dealt with? We must think of him object- 
ively. Not that his work is objective,v^to 
be sure, but that in order to be subjective 
it needs to be thought of objectively. So 
we may bring back the very phrases of 
objective atonement, only we will under- 
stand that we are using them as beautiful 
symbols to deliver us from over-subjectivity; 
not that we accept any mechanical logical 
conception which might seem to flow from 
their use. So shall Christ become our great 
moral power. So shall his vicarious sacrifice 
renew the world. 

IV 

All this work is done with a mental bril- 
liancy, a resourcefulness in conflict, a con- 
177 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

stant and detailed reference to the Bible 
seen from continually surprising angles, a 
depth of spiritual power, a devotion to 
Christ and a moral passion of which this 
discussion has given no adequate notion at 
all. It is a splendid piece of constructive 
work coming from the mind and heart of a 
great Christian man. Now, what is to be 
our verdict upon it? 1. In the first place, 
the great positive contention is true. Mr. 
Charles W. Iglehart once described the 
"Moral Influence theory" as "a number of 
true things about the atonement." That 
Christ's work is a power in men can never 
be denied, but while that is true it is not 
all the truth ; while it is a power in men it is 
also an achievement for men ; and this Bush- 
nell did not see. 2. Not a little of BuslmelFs 
negative work will stand. The crass 
mechanical views of the atonement must be 
repudiated, and repudiated as earnestly as 
by Bushnell; but he had not faced the ques- 
tion whether an objective work of Christ 
had not been wrought which was no mechan- 
ical or commercial exchange, but a vital 
thing, capable of being expressed in terms 
178 



BUSHNELL 

of vitality. And he did not ask if many 
who used terribly inadequate phrases might 
not be feeling after a reality which their 
phrases grossly misrepresented, but which 
was the great fact of the whole matter for 
all that. If he had sought to find the vital 
meaning in an objective atonement, instead 
of discarding it, all his work would have 
been different. 3. His presentation of the 
moral view keeps within sound of the 
thunders of Mount Sinai in the most won- 
derful way. It would surely be impossible 
to present the moral view in a more whole- 
some fashion. What he says of judgment, 
punishment, and all ethical things bristles 
with cutting blades of moral intensity. This 
is not, I think one may say, a characteristic 
of typical moral-influence theories. Could 
a man who had such an intensely glowing 
sense of fundamental moral things continue 
contented with the moral view? It remained 
to be seen. 4. His theory of language was 
a pitfall to its user. Of course there is a 
large symbolic element in language; but if 
speech is to be at all trustworthy, there must 
be a place for definite meanings, and even 
179 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

in transcendent themes we may be sure of 
certain results without claiming any ex- 
haustive knowledge. We may have islands 
of certainty even in the infinite ocean. 
There is a symbolic element in language 
and there is a definite element. When all 
speech is reduced to symbol it makes a man 
too free. It tends to make him lawless. 
5. So Bushnell's use of the Bible, uncon- 
sciously to himself, was free and easy. It 
is not dependable. Often where modern 
criticism would have delivered Bushnell 
from difficulty he just takes wings and flies 
away. He had a right to the deliverance, 
but he had no right to the method, and often 
he uses the method when he has no right 
either to the deliverance or to the method. 
We must treat words more seriously and 
reverently than his theory allowed. 6. His 
feeling that the great subjective work must 
be spoken of as though it were objective is 
a most interesting thing. It gives an air of 
artificiality to this part of a most real book. 
Yet his point is surely well made, and the 
escape from the dilemma is not hard for vis 
to see. The work must be thought of 
180 



BUSHNELL 

objectively because it is an objective work — 
not as a necessary mental fiction. It is a 
work for us, and so becomes a power in us. 
Seeing the matter in this light, we preserve 
all that is of value in the moral view and 
give the deeper — the central — fact of the 
atonement its right place. 7. With all its 
vitality, there are most vital and essential 
questions the book does not adequately face : 
What does sin mean in the sight of God? 
Does sin make such a difference to God that 
something more than the rescue of the sinner 
must be done to satisfy him? How is the 
rescued man to have peace in spite of his 
memory of past sins ? Just what is the New 
Testament consciousness about the death of 
Christ? 8. Bushnell did not succeed in so 
getting the great law of right quite into the 
natm-e of God that here was the very source 
of its existence. If he had done this, and 
had faced the demand of the nature of 
God in the presence of sin, he would have 
found full deliverance from mechanical 
and commercial theories, but he would not 
have made the port of the moral-influence 
theory. 

181 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

V 

The second volume of The Vicarious 
Sacrifice was first pubhshed in 1874 — eight 
years after the pubhcation of the first 
volume. It was published as a separate 
work, with the title, Forgiveness and Law, 
and it was Bushnell's intention that it should 
appear finally as a substitute for Parts III 
and IV of his earlier volume. This was 
much objected to, and after his death it was 
decided to let the first volume stand as it 
was, and publish Forgiveness and Law as a 
second volume under the same title as the 
first — The Vicarious Sacrifice. 

This volume came as a result of what 
Bushnell felt to be an accession of new light. 
It has two positive contentions. One has 
regard to propitiation, the other expresses 
a conception of the relation of law and com- 
mandment. Bushnell had made the dis- 
covery that when a man tries to forgive there 
is a moral repulsion which can be overcome 
only as the person wronged gives himself, 
in some way, in self-sacrifice and suffering, 
to the one who has wronged him. Then the 
182 



BUSHNELL 

hardness or moral repulsion departs from 
his own heart. He has propitiated himself. 
Using his favorite principle of arguing from 
analogy, Bushnell reasoned, If this be true 
of human nature, why not of the divine 
nature? And so he came to the conclusion 
that there is a moral repulsion in God's 
nature which is overcome by self -propitia- 
tion. But this self-propitiation of God is 
not the suffering life and death of Jesus. 
These are the means by which God's self- 
propitiation is revealed to men. But the 
self -propitiation itself is an eternal thing — 
God's everlasting taking cost and suffering 
upon himself — by virtue of his very nature. 
Jesus made this aspect of the nature of God 
tangible to men. It now becomes possible 
for Bushnell to see more in the phrases 
representing the idea of propitiation in the 
Bible. He now has a distinctly Godward 
side in his conception of the atonement. 
The other positive contention of the new 
volume had regard to law and command- 
ment. Bushnell felt that the commandment 
of Christ was a different thing from the law 
— the statutes — of the Old Testament. The 
183 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

one was legal, and imposed demands for a 
man to perform definite things. The other 
implanted a great principle and, in free and 
spontaneous dependence on Christ, expected 
loyalty to it. Life, Bushnell felt, is full of 
parallels to these two. First there is the 
legal demand ; later, with new incentives, the 
spontaneous loyalty. But these legal de- 
mands have regard not to final justice, but 
to discipline, and the "penallj^ coercive dis- 
cipline" and the great motives back of the 
commandment together work the completion 
of the Christian man. Final justice comes 
only in the summing up after this life is 
over. It has nothing to do with this life. 
This world is a place of discipline. And in 
that discipline the harder pressure of the 
law and the creative incentives of the com- 
mandment work together. Bushnell re- 
affirms his attitude toward justification by 
faith and urges finally the viewing of 
Christianity under different forms of 
thought, such as those used by Jesus in fore- 
telling the Holy Spirit's work, in order that 
we may be freed from the frozen lifelessness 
of old formulas, and, perhaps, at last, from 
184 



BUSHNELL 

the larger perspective, see more adequately 
the great meaning of old words enslaved 
now by a scholastic theology. 

This book was written when Bushnell was 
about seventy years old. There are several 
things to be said about it. 1. It shows his 
wonderful openness of mind. He was al- 
ways ready to receive new truth. He was 
the kind of man who keeps growing to the 
day of his death. 2. It was, more than he 
really knew, probably, a step toward an ob- 
jective view of the atonement. It recog- 
nized an obstacle in God which had to be 
met. It was met, he believed, by self -pro- 
pitiation. This was a long step. Wlien a 
man sees that God's nature is such that 
something must be done to satisfy him 
before sin can be forgiven he is no longer 
merely a teacher of the moral-influence 
theory. 3. The significance of all this lies 
here; Bushnell had written the most nobly 
Christian exposition which could be made 
of the moral view. If a Christian could ever 
rest in that view, he could rest in it as it is 
expressed by Busluiell. But Bushnell him- 
self could not rest in it. His own Christian 
185 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

consciousness was so profound that it re- 
quired something more. And so the man of 
seventy years set about thinking out this 
"something more" and found it as an ob- 
jective element, a Godward side to the 
atonement. So, though he himself did not 
see it, Bushnell becomes the most effective 
critic of the moral view. 4. It is, I think, 
not fanciful to see a certain kinship between 
Bushnell's idea of self-propitiation and 
Professor Curtis's idea of self-expression. 
The latter idea seems to have the reality 
Bushnell was reaching after. 5. His con- 
tention that this world is not being conducted 
on principles of absolute and stringent 
justice is correct. Such a view would pre- 
clude forgiveness. 6. But you do not feel 
that he has found the real root of the demand 
for the atonement. His is a nobly Christian 
mind moving toward the haven with the 
haven not yet in sight. The great true thing 
about Bushnell in relation to theology was 
his profound conviction that theology 
must not be a dead formula but a living 
reality. It must be a perfect dynamo of 
vital energy. 

186 



ROBERT WILLIAM DALE AND 

HIS THEOLOGY, WITH 

SPECIAL CONSIDERATION OF 

HIS THEORY OF THE 

ATONEMENT 



CHAPTER VII 

ROBERT WILLIAM DALE AND HIS THEOL- 
OGY, WITH SPECIAL CONSIDERATION 
OF HIS THEORY OF THE ATONEMENT 

I. The Man and His Work 

One day a visitor to the English city of 
Birmingham sought out the Carr's Lane 
Congregational Church. He walked to and 
fro in front of the building looking up at it. 
And as he walked he thought, "It is here 
that so great a preacher proclaims the ever- 
lasting gospel." The visitor was Andrew 
M. Fairbairn, the future principal of Mans- 
field College, Oxford, and the preacher who 
had so stirred his admiration by a volume of 
printed sermons was Dr. Robert William 
Dale. More than this young Congrega- 
tional scholar looked upon Carr's Lane and 
its pastor with enthusiasm. He was 
Birmingham's greatest preacher, one of its 
most potent civic forces, and a man whose 
influence reached far over England. 

In December, 1829, Dale was born. His 
189 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

father was a manufacturer of hat trimmings. 
The home was more than serious enough, 
but under its austerity there was a deep and 
warm affection. It was the great desire of 
the mother that her son "Bobby" should be 
a minister, and for this she was "wiUing to 
make any sacrifice." Dale was sent to 
private schools, not always fortunately 
chosen, but even as a boy he showed more 
fondness for books than for play. At four- 
teen he was deeply engaged with Butler's 
Analogy, and before he was sixteen he had 
a written philosophical discussion with a 
Scotch metaphysician. 

At fourteen he became an assistant school- 
master. Religious struggles began about 
this time. He tells how he read James's 
"Anxious Enquirer" on his knees, and in 
keen distress about his personal salvation. 
His own words must tell of his conversion. 
"At last — how, I cannot tell — all came clear: 
I ceased thinking of myself and of my faith, 
and thought only of Christ: then I won- 
dered that I should have been perplexed 
for even a single hour." 

At the age of fifteen Dale was received 
190 



DALE 

into the church and soon began preaching. 
Even then the quahties of his preaching 
caused hearers to feel that the ministry 
should be his life-work. Difficulties were re- 
moved and at the age of eighteen Dale found 
himself in Spring Hill College, Birming- 
ham. In the school Henry Rogers, a contrib- 
utor to the Spectator in its greatest days, 
deeply influenced Dale. From him the 
young student learned to care profoundly 
for real literary qualities of style. He was a 
diligent student and his scholastic career was 
one of unusual distinction. At this time 
George Dawson, the brilliant Birmingham 
preacher who vigorously expressed his social 
ideals, exercised what was to be a lasting 
influence over Dale, who caught his civic pas- 
sion without imbibing his less desirable ideas. 
By this time John Angel James, for fifty 
years pastor of the important Carr's Lane 
Congregational Church, had his eye upon 
the able young student. The degree of 
M. A. having been received from London 
University, Dale found himself first the 
assistant, then the co-pastor of Dr. James at 
Carr's Lane. Upon the death of Dr, James 
191 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

in 1859 Dale was made sole pastor of the 
Church, which position he held for thirty- 
five years. We will not attempt to follow 
the life of multifarious activity which now 
opened upon him, but will content ourselves 
with speaking briefly of some of its aspects. 
Dale was first of all a preacher. His 
sermons from the first moved in stately 
fashion at a lofty height. He wrote and 
read them because he was unwilling to trust 
his exhaustless fertility of speech. His 
sermons were not always within the compre- 
hension of all of his audience, but a poor 
woman who confessed that she never under- 
stood them said that she was so helped by 
his prayers that she always came to church. 
And he preached sermons. There was no 
self-conscious garnishing of stjde, and no 
seeking for a reputation for profundity. 
The depth of his thought was the natural 
outcome of a mighty mental inquiry applied 
to great problems ; the high level of his style 
was a real expression of the man. He was 
a preacher of courage. When he had been 
at Carr's Lane for years he was able to say, 
"I have never feared, and I have never 
192 



DALE 

flattered you." The truths of the faith 
mastered him, and he forged them into ser- 
mons poured forth at white heat; practical 
Christian ethics claimed him, and a passion 
for righteousness penetrating every depart- 
ment of life glowed at Carr's Lane, then 
out over England; the glories of the inner 
life of the Christian shone upon his soul, 
and then transfigured his pulpit. 

In the early days he had been told that 
Carr's Lane people would not stand doc- 
trinal preaching. He replied that they 
would have to stand it. "I think God could 
hardly confer upon this country a greater 
blessing," he declared, "than in reawakening 
that intense interest in religious doctrine 
which characterized the heroic men who be- 
longed to the times of the commonwealth." 
So he kept Carr's Lane's great congrega- 
tions hanging eagerly upon his words as he 
spoke of the great doctrines, and even 
preached to them his theory of the atone- 
ment. And not only Carr's Lane but 
England listened. 

All the while Dale was becoming a great 
municipal power. He had imbibed the ideals 
193 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of men like Dawson and threw himself 
heartily into every plan for the betterment 
of the city. In counting the influences that 
have made Birmingham "the best governed 
city in the world" Dale's contribution will 
be found to be a very important one. From 
municipal affairs to politics is a short step, 
and Dale grew to be a great political power. 
A quotation from a speech by Joseph 
Chamberlain made after his final election to 
Parliament will illustrate this. "I have seen 
a statement/' said Mr. Chamberlain, "that 
I go to Parliament as the representative of 
Mr. Dale. Well, if that be so, there is not a 
member of the House of Commons who will 
have a better, nobler, or wiser constituency." 
There is not space to tell how, inspired by 
a vision of the reign of Christ in the affairs 
of men, he threw himself into politics and 
became a great Liberal leader. In city and 
in nation his influence was a pressure always 
toward the reign of right and righteousness 
in public affairs. 

Then Dale was a great educator. Inter- 
ested in different kinds of schools, studying 
their problems and taking part in their con- 
194 



DALE 

trol, he became a national educational figure. 
He was the deciding factor in the removing 
of Spring Hill College to Oxford; and 
Mansfield College is to-day the great monu- 
ment of his educational influence. 

Recognition after recognition came to 
him. Chairman of the Congregational 
Union, LL.D. from Glasgow, member of 
Royal Commission on elementary education, 
chairman of International Council of Con- 
gregational Churches — such are a few 
honors which come quickly to mind. In 
Australia he spoke in city after city, return- 
ing to a great welcome in Birmingham typi- 
fied by the large printed greeting, "We love 
you and we tell you so." In America he 
gave the Yale lectures on preaching, noble 
utterances voicing intellectual and spiritual 
ideals every preacher might well make his 
own. He wrote sermons, pamphlets, and 
books, achieving a style Sir William Rob- 
ertson Nicoll has called "one of the most 
perfect in the whole range of English 
Literature." Dean Alford reviewed a vol- 
ume of his sermons with enthusiasm. West- 
cott wrote with warm appreciation of his 
195 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

work on Ephesians, and Cardinal Newman 
paid tribute to his book on the atonement. 

Even this is not all. This busy, active, 
versatile man found time in lonely medita- 
tion to become in a notable sense a great 
mystic. His journey to Palestine with its 
hours of quiet musing left its mark upon 
his life. Then great personal bereavement 
came. And the terrible disruption of the 
Liberal party caused his retirement from 
political life. He became ill and had period 
after period of enforced idleness and suffer- 
ing. And out of this sorrow and disap- 
pointment he went, not to an embittered and 
cynical old age, but to a sunset glory of 
communion with God. 

Now his sermons came to glow with the 
light of this hidden communion. He made 
the discovery in his own words that "Christ 
is alive," and every Sunday morning his 
people were asked to sing an Easter hymn. 
He wrote sermons and books enriched with 
a spiritual depth and power, unknown be- 
fore even in his fertile ministry. 

Then, in 1895, the end came. Birming- 
ham and England joined to do him honor. 
196 



DALE 

No such concourse had been seen for man}^ 
years as his funeral j^rocession. "Above on 
the sandstone chff in which the cemetery is 
quarried, on the long platform of the rail- 
way station, and on the station roof itself 
men and women stood in serried lines, and 
from beyond the walls came the murmur of 
unseen thousands outside." In West- 
minster Abbey and in Saint Paul's Cathe- 
dral, as well as all over the country, voices 
were lifted in eager tribute. It had been 
a life of amazing energy and versatility and 
a life of great achievement. But best of 
all it had been the life of a man of God. 

II. Dale's Theology 

In approaching Dale's theology we must 

remind ourselves of some of the outstanding 

features of the theological situation in which 

he found himself. He was an heir of the 

Puritan movement and two great things 

came down to him from it. First there was 

r an almost overwhelming sense of God. The 

^Puritan, to paraphrase some one's words, 

feared God so much that he feared nothing 

else. And the movement gave to its sons a 

197 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

sense of the height and majesty of God. 
Puritanism had seen Isaiah's vision of the 
holy God, and never forgot the awful glory 
of the experience. Then Puritanism be- 
lieved in God reigning. It had been almost 
a theocracy in the days of the commonwealth. 
And in the blood of its sons there throbbed 
an eagerness for the Christian conquest of 
national life. To an heir of Cromwell 
theology could never be simply an affair of 
the cloister. 

But the eighteenth century had spread the 
palsying blight of deism over England. 
Deism was the theory of the absent God 
and the self-sufficient man. One good thing 
had come from deism — a sense that man and ^ 
man's powers must be taken account of. 
For at this point the Calvinistic Puritan was 
weakest. He was so dazzled by his vision of j 
God that he could not see man. It was 
great to have this vision of God, but man 
must be taken account of. And Calvinism 
had hard and rigid things to say about man 
and God's relation to him. Its theory of 
the atonement had been constructed with 
bars of steel fastened by iron bolts. It was 
198 



DALE 

strong, but it was cruel. In alleviation of 
this, theories of public justice which sought 
to explain the atonement as a feature of 
God's judicial dealing with men were intro- 
duced. 

In this atmosphere of mitigated Cal- 
vinism Dale received his own theological 
training. The out-and-out reaction from 
Calvinism which preferred no God, to the 
God of the Calvinist, cannot be said to have 
influenced Dale. He felt that Christianity 
must be rational, but had not a particle of 
the rationalist in him. But he was more than 
a son of the Puritan movement — he was a 
son of the great revival. Wesley had 
created a living church, and helped to give 
new life to the existing churches. A real 
Christian experience makes a new man of 
your theologian, and Dale had a real Chris- 
tian experience. The root of everything in 
his theology is that he had found forgive- 
ness, peace, and life in the salvation of 
Christ. This will help to account for the 
small effect the tractarian movement had 
upon him. The tractarian movement was a 
great seeking for rehgious authority, and a 
199 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

finding of it in the church. A hving ex- 
perience of the power of Christ set Dale free 
from the dangers of this quest. 

The broad church movement had real 
points of contact with him. Its passion for 
Christianity dominant in life was his own. 
Its rejoicing sense of all Christ was touched 
his sympathy. But to Dale Christianity 
must have a deeper root than it gave. He 
could rest only in a theology which found 
its center in a mighty expiation. 

Coming now to Dale's own theology. He 
never wrote it out in a complete system; it 
must be gleaned from his various utterances. 
He had brought his powerful mind to bear 
upon problem after problem. And his 
thinking moved in the direction of a system. 

Let us begin with the great question of 
authority. He dealt with it in an epoch- 
making book, The Living Christ and the 
Four Gospels. The portrait of Christ is by ^ 
its own power morally convincing, he tells 
us. And when a man submits himself to 
the gospel message and accepts the Saviour 
he comes to know for himself, for salvation 
is the revelation of the living Christ in his 
200 



DALE 

own life. This experience of his is confirmed 
by the similar experiences of sixty genera- 
tions of Christians all over the world. Here 
is a great Gibraltar. The church is sm-e 
because it knows. Its experience vindicates 
the authority of Christ. How much this 
message meant as it traveled over England 
and America in the days of a brilliant and 
destructive criticism it would be hard ade- 
quately to say. It was one of Dale's noblest 
messages to the church. 

Coming to Dale's conception of God, we 
find that even his theism felt the warmth 
of his experience. A man was to be a theist 
not simply with his head. He was to ex- 
perience his theism. Dale's whole theology 
was colored by the sweeping majesty of his 
conception of God. It gathered together 
the noblest things of Puritanism, and fused 
them in a personal experience of awe in the 
presence of the Most High. 

Dale's speculations regarding the Trinity 
reveal a certain philosophical inaptitude. He 
speaks of the Father as though he were the 
transcendent one, the Holy Spirit the im- 
manent one, and the Son the personal re- 
201 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

vealer. But he is clear in his assertion that 
/'There are not three Gods, but in the hfe 

(and being of the One God there are three 
centers of consciousness, vohtion, and 
activity." 

In deaHng with man we come upon Dale's 
belief that man's very life roots in a higher 
life, that apart from this higher life, he has 
no life of his own. Sin is not only the rejec- 
tion of moral and spiritual well-being. It 
is the rejection of the root of life itself. So 
Dale came ultimately to believe in the an- 
Anihilation of the finally perverse. The 
important thing at this point is to see what 
an organic part of his thought this view was. 
Its inadequacy had its roots deep in his 
thought. His method of dealing with free- 
dom and sin, and man's relation to the race, 
reveals a noble man in the difficulties of 
intellectual problems which he tried ineffec- 
tually to solve. He had an overwhehning 
sense of sin, nobly Christian in its whole 
quality. But the tragedy of moral evil was 
sin to him. He made the terrible mistake 
of concluding that man was a sharer in the 
responsibility for sins to which he had no 
202 



DALE 

v' relation of personal choice. The failure 
here is seen throughout his discussion. He 
tried to preserve man's freedom and to be 
just to his personal life. But he never really 
succeeded — and he never knew that he failed. 
There was enough Calvinism in his blood 
to give him content with inadequate views. 
But deeper than this he was sure that he 
could trust the race to the God who had 
cared enough for it to give it Calvary. 

His conception of redemption we will 
soon consider in detail. The church was the 
body of men and women who possessed the 
new hfe in Christ. It could not be rightly 
a state church, for that included those who 
did not have the life in Christ. The seat of 
church government and authority was those 
who enjoyed this life. The sacraments 
were not a magical rite, but the Lord's 
( Supper was more than a memorial. It was 
4 a spiritual opportunity. Here the Christian 
could receive spiritually the life of his Lord. 
Sanctification was the life in Christ victori- 
ously possessing the Christian. Immortality 
this victorious life in its endless progression. 
The doom of the wicked, the absence of all 
203 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

life, even existence, because they utterly 
turned from the offered life in Christ. 

Dale's theology was Christian doctrine 
construed from the standpoint of a personal 
experience of the life in Christ. Its strengtli 
was in this triumphant emphasis on Chris- 
tian experience, its weakness a failure to 
understand that personal intention is the 
crucial thing in human life, and a tendency 
to add to the ethical personal relation of the 
Christian with his Lord a metaphysical re- 
lation which can hardly be cleared of the 
charge of pantheism, and of which we shall 
see more in his theory of the atonement. 

III. Dale^s Theory of the Atonement 

Dale was trained, as we have seen, in a 
school where the tendency was to explain 
our Lord's work from the standpoint of 
^ public justice. The depth of his own reli- 
gious experience and its relation to a pro- 
found sense of sin would ultimately have 
demanded a personal reconsideration of the 
whole problem. But the theological move- 
ment toward the moral view of our Lord's 
work, which became more and more influen- 
204 



DALE 

tial, was in sharp contrast to his own deepest 
rehgious intuitions, and in the hght of this 
fact his personal grapple with the great 
problem was made. 
^ BushnelFs Vicarious Sacrifice, with its 
fine religious feeling, its passion for all noble 
things, and its fascination of style, was seiz- 
ing upon men's minds, as a vital and appeal- 
ing treatment of the problem. Would the 
whole world go to the moral view? A strong 
voice needed to speak if this was to be pre- 
vented. Then Dale spoke. In the Congre- 
gational Union lecture, delivered in 1875, 
Dale made his great utterance. He was 
confronted by two possible views of the work 
of our Lord. Was it an expiation, or was 
it a transcendent act to win men from sin? 
Was the great problem to turn men from 
sin, or was there a deeper problem? Was it 
/necessary that something be done to satisfy 
the righteous God before sin could be re- 
mitted? Of course in any view our Lord's 
death was a moral power. Dale did not 
dispute this. The question was. Is it simply 
and oply a moral power, or is it essentially 
expiation, then a moral power also ? 
205 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

The first task to which he set himself was 
to prove that the New Testament concep- 
tion is that the death of Christ was an 
V objective atonement. He distinguished 
sharply between the fact and any theory of 
it. He was a great deal more interested in 
the fact of an objective atonement than its 
rationale. That fact was crucial. 

In six lectures he conducted a masterly 
argument. The history of our Lord's life, 
his words, the apostolic consciousness, all 
were shown to involve an objective atone- 
ment. It was no massing of proof-texts. 
He showed how the fact of an objective 
atonement was a part of the movement of 
the apostles' thought, how it was essential 
to the effectiveness of arguments they used, 
and how at every point what they say fits in 
with it, and that they absolutely fail to say 
the things it would have been natural — even 
imperative — for them to say had they held 
the moral view. Christ and his apostles 
held, whatever we may hold, that his death 
was an expiation making possible the for- 
giveness of sin. 

Following his exceedingly vigorous and 
206 



DALE 

able exposition of New Testament conscious- 
ness, Dale takes a survey of the history of 
the interpretation by the theologians of the 
church of our Lord's death. He shows how 
Christian consciousness always clung to the 
idea of an objective work by our Lord. 
Sometimes the explanations theologians 
gave were absurd. There was plenty of 
inadequacy here. But through it all Chris- 
tian consciousness clung to the idea of an 
objective work. And the theologians simply 
did the best they could to provide a rationale 
for it. Here, then, was a great standing 
ground. The New Testament and Chris- 
tian consciousness united in a demand for 
the expiatory view of Christ's death. So 
much was firm whether a theory could be 
found for it or not. 

Now Dale approaches his constructive 
work. Can hght be thrown on this fact 
that our Lord's death is the ground on which 
our sins are forgiven? He believes it is 
possible, first, by considering Christ's rela- 
tion to the Eternal Law of Righteousness; 
second, by considering his relation to the 
human race. 

207 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

The ultimate source of moral distinction 
Dale conceives as the Eternal Law of 
Righteousness. This is not the result of the 
will of God, nor does it find its source in the 
nature of God. But neither is it superior 
to God. It comes to life in him. His very 
/moral sovereignty consists in his perpetual 
^ assertion of his oneness with it. He is the 
moral law alive. Punishment is conceived, 
not as a means of improving the sinner, nor 
as a means of preventing others from wrong- 
doing, nor as the expression of wrath be- 
cause of personal injury to God. It is 
deserved suffering because of the breaking 
of the law. The law of righteousness neces- 
sarily demands the eternal expression of the 
fact that sin deserves to be punished. And 
if God is to preserve his oneness with the 
Eternal Law of Righteousness, he must for- 
ever declare by deed that fact. 

Can sin, then, be forgiven? There was a 
conception which regarded penalty as self- 
acting. Page after page is devoted to the 
eloquent overthrow of this view. It simply 
does not correspond to the facts of life. But 
let us look more deeply at penalty. Now, 
208 



DALE 

we find that its very greatest power comes 
from the fact that it is a personal thing. 
The God who is one with the Eternal Law 
of Righteousness is back of it. It is not 
simply the work of a mechanical law. It is 
the deed of a God who is Righteousness 
alive. Now, if God ever forgives sin, he 
must find some way of asserting this prin- 
ciple that sin deserves to be punished, of 
revealing his oneness with the Eternal Law 
of Righteousness which shall be as effective 
as the punishment of the sinner. Here we 
come to the crisis in the discussion. Christ — 
himself God, Judge of men — whose pre- 
rogative is the punishment of the sinner, 
/endures the punishment instead of inflict- 
\ing it, and so the problem is solved. God's 
love for the sinner gives his punishment of 
the sinner a great added moral significance. 
His love for the Son makes the deed on 
Calvary, when the Father withdrew his 
companionship from the Son and left him 
^in the very loneliness of a condemned sinner, 
an act of divine self-sacrifice beyond any- 
thing of which we could have conceived. 
This is the grandest moment in the moral 
209 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

history of God. So Christ asserts God's 
oneness with the Eternal Law of Righteous- 
ness. So he makes possible the forgiveness 
of sin. 

But had Christ any relation to the race 
which will give body and stability to this 
interpretation? Dale replies that he had, 
for Christ in Dale's conception is basally 
connected with the race's life. He is its 
root and its ideal realization. So that what 
he does is in a unique sense a race deed. 
IVhen Christ endures on Calvary the penalty 
of sin, it is in a recognition within the race 
of the terrible penal desert of sin, and makes 
possible on the part of men the same 
acknowledgment. They now make this 
verdict on the justice of sin's receiving such 
punislmient their own, through the power 
of Christ, the race representative. 

Now, before sin entered the world Christ 
was actually and ideally the race represen- 
tative before the Father. But sin broke 
right ax^ross this relation. When the 
Saviour was incarnated and bore sin's pen- 
alty, he secured to the race, in spite of sin, 
and by that very act made possible, the 
210 



DALE 

restoration of all the glorious possibilities of 
that relation as originally held. But, more 
than this, the death of Christ, through his 
basal connection with the race, is the death 
of sin. Those who accept him find in his 
death the slaying of their own sinfulness. 
Calvary thus completely conquers sin and 
assures the victory of righteousness. 

To sum up: — Christ's death is an objec- 
tive atonement for sin: 1. Because his sub- 
mission to the penal demands of law — ^he 
being the race basis — is an expression of 
ours and carries ours with it. 2. His death 
renders possible the very relation between 
the race and Christ which sin had broken, 
with all its infinite promise. 3. The death 
of Christ involves the destruction of sin in 
those who accept the Saviour. 4. The death 
of Christ expresses God's oneness with the 
Eternal Law of Righteousness as perfectly 
as it would be expressed by the punishment 
of the sinner. 

Here, then, the problem is solved. The 

Eternal Law of Righteousness has received 

final expression as one with God. The race 

has been given the supreme opportunity in 

211 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

spite of sin to be a race in Christ and so 
secure all life and all blessedness. So much 
in exposition of Dr. Dale's theory. 

Now, for our own question: Can we ac- 
cept it as a satisfactory account of the work 
of our Lord? Some grave difficulties 
emerge at once. 

1. Dr. Dale's conception of the Eternal 
Law of Righteousness, despite all his pro- 
testations, is a dethronement of God. Dale 
tried to evade the difficulty very bravely, 
but after all was said he left God the sub- 
ject of a Higher than He. We must find 
the source of the moral law in God him- 
self. When Dale said that the source of 
the law could not be in God's nature he was 
thinking of the impossibility of its being a 
mere attribute of God. The source of moral 
distinction is deeper than a mere attribute. 
It is at the basis of the very nature of God 
as a totality. But this basal thing is a richer 
thing than Dale's Eternal Law of Right- 
eousness. Beginning with moral distinction, 
it includes all moral harmony, and so becomes 
the Holiness of God. Here is the ultimate 
basis of morality. You cannot get back of 
212 



DALE 

the nature of God. There is nothing beyond 
that. The demand for an atonement comes 
not from God's allegiance to an eternal law 
of righteousness, which we cannot find ulti- 
mately rooted in his own nature. It comes 
from the Holiness which is God's own 
nature. The totality of God's nature de- 
mands Calvary. 

2. The conception of Christ as the race 
basis demands scrutiny. Dale uses it some- 
what uneasily and with less than his accus- 
tomed clarity. But it is evident that he 
means more than can be harmonized with 
genuine personal relations. He means more 
than that Christ's whole attitude toward sin 
may be made personal in the Christian's life 
through the power of God. He means more 
than that it sets free divine energies which 
enter the life as we accept the Saviour. And 
the thing he means is a sort of metaphysical 
oneness which goes a long way toward spell- 
ing pantheism. Here we strike a root of 
failure in Dale's thinking. A sharp notion 
of the integrity of personality is quite 
lacking. His notion of sin, his notion of 
redemption, his notion of the life in 
213 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

Christ are vitiated because he did not think 
of sin as a thing with personal intention 
necessarily behind it, of redemption as a 
process which at every step must have re- 
gard to the demands of man as a personal 
being and the life in Christ as a relation 
always consistent with the integrity of per- 
sonality. The incarnation was necessary 
because God could be satisfied only with a 
deed achieved in the human race, and only 
such a deed could be redemptively appro- 
priated by man. No metaphysical relation 
of Christ to the race can make his deed the 
race's possession except as it is personally 
appropriated. The flaw in Dale's thinking 
at this point is that it gives us a feature of 
redemption which conflicts with the integrity 
of the personal, ethical life. 

In conclusion, a few words of apprecia- 
tion of Dale's work on the atonement: 

1. It shows us a man trying to get a 
theory which will adequately express his 
Christian experience. This must always be 
the mood of the theologian. It gives Dale's 
work an atmosphere full of the Christian 
quality. We sympathize with what he is 
214 



DALE 

after, even when we do not think he has 
found it. 

2. He is trying to be true to the Nev/ 
Testament. He hstens eagerly, not merely 
to its words, but to its heart-beats. He 
wants to find what was the deep New Testa- 
ment feeling about redemption, what was 
its consciousness, and he wants to be true to 
it. Here he is a guide to all Christian 
thinkers. 

3. The distinction he makes between fact 
and theory is very important. Of course 
Professor Denney is right in contending 
that it must be more than a blank fact. But 
there is a difference between saying that 
Christ assumed our responsibilities, and 
wrought our redemption, and having a 
worked-out theory of our Lord's work. The 
fact, with this content, does not constitute 
a theory. And Dale was right about this 
fact being absolutely important. Typi- 
cal Christian experience has over and over 
again rested on this fact, when no articu- 
lated theory could be given. If the church 
is to keep typical Christian experience, 
this fact must be kept before men's minds, 

215 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

whether an adequate theory can be given or 
not. 

4. The two great notes which Dale struck 
— Christ's relation to the Ultimate Moral 
Demand, and Christ's relation to the Human 
Race — must never be lost sight of. They 
will have to be treated more adequately, but 
treated they must be. 

5. Few books could be better fitted to 
give a man the right temper, the right ambi- 
tion, and the real Christian emphasis in 
personal grapple with the great problem, 
than this volume by Dale. And it will be 
a personal inspiration to every man who 
rightly reads it. 



216 



THE THEOLOGICAL SITUATION 
REGARDING THE ATONEMENT 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE THEOLOGICAL SITUATION 
REGARDING THE ATONEIVIENT 

I 

Some General Characteristics of the 
Present Theological Situation 

Probably many an observer of present- 
day thought-movements would deny that 
there is a theological situation regarding 
anything. Theology, he would say, we have 
outgrown and discarded. The subtle dis- 
tinctions of schoolmen no longer concern 
men under the hea^vj pressure of the condi- 
tions of actual life. Even the preacher who 
holds his congregation has to become undog- 
matic. If a man chooses to spin out theo- 
logical theories by the pale glow of his study 
lamp, let him do it; but he has no real rela- 
tion to the thought and activity of the time. 
Out under the hot rays of the sun, the 
world's workers are busy, and have time for 
only the thought which is vital and prac- 
tical. Men care about what Jesus taught in 
the Sermon on the Mount ; that is practical. 
219 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

They do not stop to waste their time and 
energy in quarrehng over who he was: that 
is irreverent, and useless. Practical Chris- 
tian ethics has a great future; speculative 
theology is dead. There is not time even to 
bury it decently; we are bus}^ with the de- 
mands of the present. "Let the dead past 
bury its dead." But theology, like Banquo's 
ghost, will not be disposed of so easily. The 
truth of the matter is that man is a theo- 
logical being, and forsakes theolog}^ only to 
return to it. We really cannot get away 
from our nature, and it is not of much use to 
try. The patronizing loftiness with which 
many men view those who still care about 
theology is so transitory that we need not 
be disturbed about it. The human mind 
must ask theological questions and ulti- 
mately will demand some sort of an answer, 
and when the hazy indefiniteness has been 
cleared from much of present-day thinking 
we will begin to realize that more than 
mental gratification is at stake in the answer 
to the theological questions. JNIan's whole 
practical life roots in the realities with which 
these questions deal. It makes all the dif- 
220 



THE ATONEMENT 

lerence in the world whether you have a 
theology of hope or a theology of despair; 
and no theology amounts ultimately to the 
same thing as a theology of despair. If 
morality and religion are to survive, we 
must believe that the very structure of the 
universe takes sides with them. For the sake 
of righteousness and practical piety the 
great theological questions must be an- 
swered, not by specious evasions, but by 
resolute affirmations. So we will approach 
the examination of the present theological 
situation feeling that those who concern 
themselves with these things in a positive 
way have the future on their side. At the 
very start we will declare ourselves free from 
the vitiating insistence of the Zeitgeist that 
one must not affirm an}i;hing about God 
for fear of being dogmatic. 

Let us now try to look upon the present 
situation more closely. 

1. The most outstanding fact in all typical 
present thinking is modern science. "The 
reign of law" expresses in a phrase the great 
discovery of the nineteenth century. Law 
was first discovered, then deified. The great 
221 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

philosophical heresy is the viewing of law as 
self-active and self-supporting. In every 
direction, outside the church and within, men 
are afraid of this mighty uniform machine 
which they have discovered the universe to 
be. They fancy that laws have strength of 
their own. At this point the corrective much 
modern thought needs is the understanding 
that laws can do nothing; that in themselves 
they are nothing. A law is only a name for 
the way in which God works. A law with- 
out a person is as impossible as an idea with- 
out a mind. The cosmic history can be 
summed up in a brief sentence — "God acts." 
The deification of law is at the root of an 
enormous amount of the inadequacy of 
modern thought. 

2. A second characteristic of the present 
situation grows out of the results of modern 
biblical scholarship. The scientific method 
had been applied to the study of the Scrip- 
tures with results revolutionary, if not 
destructive. That much which has been con- 
fidently asserted consists of brilliant hypo- 
theses, rather than well- fortified conclusions, 
we may readily admit, but enough has com- 
222 



THE ATONEMENT 

manded the practically universal consent of 
scholars to make it possible to speak of re- 
sults of biblical criticism. In certain respects 
it will never be possible for thoughtful men 
to look upon the Bible in the same way 
again. More than this: these results have 
outlawed widely accepted views as to the 
inspiration and authority of the Bibld. It is 
no longer possible to regard it as verbally 
inspired or mechanically authoritative. Is 
Christianity itself at stake? By no means. 
But the theories as to God's method in his 
revelation, which are at stake, are so widely 
spread that a confusion of thought which 
makes them one with the faith itself is all 
too easy and natural. This helps to account 
for the great unrest within the Church and 
the increase of skepticism without. But 
Christian thinkers have not been without 
power to deal with this situation. The way 
out of the confusion, we are beginning to 
understand, is to regard God's message as 
"psychologically mediated" and its authority 
as the result, not of uncertain and external 
defenses, but of what we may call its moral 
and "spiritual cogency." To the man who 
223 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

accepts Christianity because it alone fits his 
needs, frees him from sin, and completes 
his life, external and mechanical theories of 
the Bible are so needless that he loses them 
without regret. Without a conception of 
the authority of the Bible as vital, the results 
of modern criticism are alarming; with it, 
criticism is interesting and useful when 
reverent: it is something to be strenuously 
opposed where guided by poisonously ration- 
alistic presuppositions; but in either case it 
is unable to touch the profound certainties 
of the Christian faith. The way to deal w4th 
even the worst phases of criticism, where 
a destructive conclusion has murderously 
lurked in premises of the scholar's thinking, 
is to come to the same problems with Chris- 
tian experience and Christian intuition. If 
Christian experience is kept alive, it can be 
trusted to deal with all the problems of criti- 
cism and to adjust itself to all the legitimate 
results of scholarship. The worst result of 
criticism is when a man makes it an excuse 
to turn from unpleasant realities and shut 
the deeps of his life from just the truth he 
needs. The remedy is not to curse criticism 
224 



THE ATONEMENT 

but to become passionately honest and 
earnest men. 

3. Another characteristic of our time is 
the prevalence of Christian experience which 
is not typical. One of the thought-provok- 
ing features of the life of the church is the 
prevalence of devotion to Christ which has 
not the New Testament ring. There are 
great Christians who are strangers to some 
of the characteristic moods of apostolic 
Christianity; and it is their loss. Because 
of the type of their experience both their 
theology and their scholarship are vitiated. 
The fault is that the whole nature has not 
been listened to in its call for Christ. There 
has been no thoroughgoing moral struggle 
which flung the life helpless until the Saviour 
came. The great need of the church is a 
universal redemptional consciousness among 
Christians, and the way to that is to get men 
into the current of deep moral struggle. Let 
a man face his whole life under the stress of 
the demands of his conscience, and in this 
way receive Christ, and his whole bearing 
and all his intuitions will become typical and 
trustworthy. 

225 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

4. A feature of the present situation for 
which one can only have praise is the deep- 
ened ethical sense of which we are seeing 
constant evidences. The whole foundation 
of Christianity must be seen to be clearly 
moral if men are to be satisfied by it. 
Presentations of doctrine which are charac- 
terized by ethical makeshift can have no 
profound seizure upon our time. It would 
be impossible for a theory of "God's cheat- 
ing the devil by a piece of sharp practice" 
to take its rise to-day. The whole study of 
the Bible and of Christianity has a new 
frankness and candor and a new honesty. 
Men feel that it is no longer possible to deal 
with Christian truths in the temper of the 
Jesuit. Every Christian doctrine must be 
judged at the bar of this alert ethical sense. 

5. Then there is a new emphasis on 
psychology. The facts of experience must 
be taken account of. They must be treated 
scientifically. The inner life of men is a 
realm for careful investigation. While it is 
possible to do exceedingly superficial work 
in this realm, if a man has not a proper 
perspective and sense of values, the interest 

226 



THE ATONEMENT 

in psychology, and the feehng that it must 
be taken account of, is very hopeful and full 
of possibility, for the closer you get to an 
adequate psychology of the inner life the 
nearer you come to the place where it is seen 
that real and essential Christianity is de- 
manded by the nature of man. 

6. One more general characteristic of the 
present situation is its dawning social vision. 
There is a deepened hunger for brotherhood, 
and a new feeling of man's responsibility 
for man. The most vital thought of the time 
has this quality of eagerness for social service 
and for a social goal. It has permeated 
present-day activities and created vast 
philanthropies. It is seen in the ardent 
dreams of the Socialist and the quiet service 
of the settlement worker. A theology which 
has a social message will find a vital point 
of contact here. 

The attempt to deal with the whole situa- 
tion which we have been discussing, which 
has obtained the greatest influence, has been 
the Ritschlian theology. The Ritschlian 
theology is a surrender to the spirit of the 
times. It does nothing to the false concep- 
227 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

tion of law, but tries to formulate a theory 
of Christianity which can live with it. It 
drops every Christian emphasis unpleasant 
to the modern mind. It is an expression of 
a devotion to Christ which has never mea- 
sured the reaches of Christian experience. 
It does, in its theory of value judgments, 
move in the right direction for securing a 
true basis for the authority of Christianity, 
but in the refusal to allow religious truth to 
be related to scientific truth it becomes the 
creator of an emasculated Christianity. It 
is alert to avoid ethical makeshift, but fails 
to discern the profoundest ethical realities of 
life. Its psychology is that of the bays and 
inlets of human life. It has never sounded 
the great deep. Bring a man profoundly 
convicted of sin into the presence of the 
Ritschlian theology, and it has not an ade- 
quate word to say to him. It does feel the 
social hunger, however, and in a real way 
expresses it. The valuable things of the 
Zeitgeist are expressed here, but its weak- 
nesses also. And so the Ritschlian theology, 
full of fresh eagerness and fine places of 
reality as it is, as a total is thoroughly inade- 
228 



THE ATONEMENT 

quate. The theology which deals adequately 
with the spirit of the time and the men of 
the time must not speak like a cringing 
courtier, but must speak with the voice of 
a king. 

II 

The Situation Regarding the 
Atonement 

It was important to say so much in a 
general way because all the things we have 
discussed have an important bearing upon 
the atonement as a problem for our time. 
It is in this world that present-day thinking 
about the atonement is being done. When 
we come to the consideration of the atone- 
ment itself the first thing which strikes us 
is the movement away from the Satisfaction 
Theory. Various reasons have contributed 
to this. Probably the most important are 
these four: 

1. An Ethical Reason. The Satisfaction 
Theory has often been presented in ways 
which made it repulsive to a sound ethical 
sense. It would be difficult to get any ade- 
quate conception of the amount of struggle 
229 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

earnest men have had with immoral presen- 
tations of the work of our Lord. A revolt 
from the theory in whose name these presen- 
tations were made was inevitable. 

2. A Reason in Reality, The Satisfac- 
tion Theory has been presented as such an 
inanimate mechanism that it had not even 
a throb of life. As men have listened to 
solutions in which only cold logic and com- 
mercial exchange were involved they have 
been repulsed. A theory of the atonement 
needs to be real. 

3. A Theological Reason, The distaste 
for theology has left men with inadequate 
ideas of God and of sin. With no high 
doctrine of God, through which the fire of 
moral lightnings flashed, they have lost the 
sense that there was an obstacle in God 
which must be met before sin could be for- 
given. With conceptions of sin which have 
lost the penetrating sense of its heinous 
tragedy the problem has seemed to become 
far less grave, and the solution just the 
revelation of the Father's love. 

4. A Personal Reason, Men are proud 
creatures. They do not like to bend too 

230 



THE ATONEMENT 

much even to God. And the Satisfaction 
Theory made men bend. They have pre- 
ferred some theory which called for a smaller 
price from men's pride — which demanded on 
the part of men less humiliation. Probably 
this personal reason has had to do with more 
turning from the deeper interpretation of 
our Lord's work than men would be ready 
to admit. The out-and-out reaction from 
the Satisfaction Theory is, of course, repre- 
sented by the various forms of the Moral 
Influence Theory. There is much that is 
winsome and attractive about this theory, 
and there is much that is true. In its highest 
fol^ms it is quite saturated with elevated 
Christian feeling. As presented by Ritschl 
it does not commend itself much, but when 
we have a clear sense of the deity of om^ 
Lord, and his passionate desire, even at the 
price of death, to win men from sin, it be- 
comes a great theory, with power to feed us. 
Doubtless, the most generally attractive 
theory of our Lord's work is some form of 
the Moral Influence Theory. In Christ we 
see the heart of God, and, seeing, we are 
won to him. Multitudes will heartily accept 
231 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

this statement of our Lord's work. But 
this is not enough. Even the highest type 
of the Moral Influence Theory assumes that 
all there is to be done is to get a bad man 
made into a good one. But that is not all. 
The man who rests in the Moral Influence 
Theory may be a real Christian, but he has 
never seen what God actually is. And he 
has never sounded the depth of his own 
moral life. If he had, he would know that 
something had to be done about his past sin. 
The great, holy God must be satisfied, and 
man's own conscience demands something 
deeper than revelation, forgiveness, and a 
new life. Then the New Testament is an 
awkward book if you have merely the Moral 
Influence Theory. It calls for something 
deeper. 

Men who have felt that they could not 
live in the Satisfaction Theory and were 
unable, too, to rest in the Moral Influence 
Theory, have tried to find an abiding place 
along lines first marked out by Grotius, in 
the Governmental Theory. The thing that 
is deeper than the Moral Influence Theory, 
they have said, is that God is a ruler. He 
232 



THE ATONEMENT 

must protect the interests of moral govern- 
ment. Christ's death served the very end 
of penalty in regard to moral government. 
Therefore the sinner may be forgiven. The 
death of Christ is a vindication of God's 
moral concern. This theory too witnesses to 
a truth. Our Lord's death is certainly a 
vindication of God as a God of moral con- 
cern. But unless it is more than that, it is 
a question if it can be as much. If it is 
only an awful fact, put there to show God's 
hatred of sin, the question is, Does it really 
do it? 

There must be a deeper root to save it 
from being erratic. Then it does not pene- 
trate into the depth of the obstacle in God. 
This is far deeper than the needs of moral 
government. Somehow this theory has not 
struck vitally with men in our time. With 
the inadequacies we have already mentioned 
another may help to account for this: The 
Governmental Theory is not deeply related 
to the New Testament. Besides the reac- 
tion from the Satisfaction Theory there has 
been the attempt to state it so as to give it 
an actual contact with the lives of earnest 
233 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

men. In this connection, of course, the name 
of Dale comes to our minds at once. He 
made it clear that the Satisfaction Theory 
could be so stated as to be exceedingly real 
and vital, even if his statement was not 
adequate. Our Lord's work was rich and 
diverse in its bearings, and men have seized 
upon various aspects of it as the cardinal 
features of theories. Their works have been 
statements of various true things about our 
Lord and his work, but have not had the 
strength of a final theory. To the degree 
that they have a deep sense of sin and of 
God's righteousness they have had power to 
feed real Christian life. Lacking this, they 
have contributed to a superficial type of 
Christian experience. 

With a widespread superficiality in the 
treatment of the atonement there has been 
a hunger for something deeper. This has 
been voiced in a volume of most unusual 
noteworthiness — Professor Denney's The 
Death of Christ. The book comes right out 
of the modern methods of scholarship, and 
from a mind fully equipped with fine instru- 
ments of thought and aware of all the move- 
234 



THE ATONEMENT 

merits of the theological world. This book 
makes it absolutely clear that to the New 
Testament consciousness our Lord's death 
was a substitution for us — that the atone- 
ment is an achievement which he wrought 
for us, and that all the other great things 
about our Lord's work flow from this. "He 
was a sin-bearer." This message not only 
represents New Testament consciousness, 
but this is Christianity. Professor Denney 
does not have a philosophy to offer for this. 
He does not seem to feel the need of it. 

He has not given us a rationale of the 
atonement, but he has said things so funda- 
mental, and with such fearless freedom from 
bending to the call of the spirit of the time, 
that a new hopefulness has been given to 
the whole theological situation. 

All this is the background of a book which 
appeared in the fall of 1905 — The Christian 
Faith, by Professor Olin A. Curtis. We 
want to see how this work is related to this 
whole theological situation and the signifi- 
cance and value of his theory of the atone- 
ment. 

(1) Some General Remarks about Pro- 
235 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

fessor Curtis's Theology. The first thing 
Professor Curtis does is to set himself free 
from false conceptions of law. Law is not 
self-sustaining. It is God at work. Evolu- 
tion is not a self-sufficient process. Nothing 
happens in the whole movement of which 
God is not the final causal power. This 
opening chapter having lifted the flag of 
defiance to the Zeitgeist — when the Zeitgeist 
is wrong — we expect a treatment of the 
problems of theology which will not be 
simply a reflection of the spirit of the times, 
and we are not disappointed. We study 
man to see what is in him ; what the demands 
of his inner life really are. So we come to 
the imperative need of religion, then of the 
Christian religion, if this man's life is to 
come to completion and peace. Thus we 
reach Christianity fathoms below the plane 
where criticism works, and find in Chris- 
tianity a vital and adequate authority. The 
book is related to real and typical Christian 
experience — the New Testament type of 
experience too. Every reader will feel this 
quality, and the fact that one man was con- 
verted while reading the book seems to em- 
236 



THE ATONEMENT 

phasize this. The modern demand for an 
ethical treatment of Christianity is here 
fully met. There is not an ethical subter- 
fuge in the book. It is unflinchingly frank 
and honest, and it interprets Christianity 
without even a particle of Jesuitical evasion. 
The emphasis on psychology, which we 
found to be a part of modern thought, is 
strategically used to show that from the 
standpoint of psychology we can prove that 
men need many things from which the 
modern mind now turns. An element of 
peculiar strength is this penetrating psycho- 
logical analysis. One of the fine things 
about the present situation we found to be 
its dawning social vision. Now, the whole 
spirit of the social hunger is gathered up 
and poured forth in this book. We may 
say, then, that it has the most thorough con- 
tact with the real things in the life of to-day, 
while it is not afraid to repudiate what is 
felt to be inadequate or false. 

(2) The Racial Theory of Our Lord's 

jRedem'ptive Work. First we must look 

upon Professor Curtis's approach to his 

theory of our Lord's redemptive work, 

237 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

God's holiness is the totaUty of all that he 
is. It is the law of the organic life of the 
Trinity. It is infinite moral love. The very 
life of God requires that this law of holiness 
should be expressed. In a normal situation 
it freely comes forth in full and harmonious 
expression. In an abnormal situation caused 
by sin a dualism is caused, with a necessary 
emphasis on moral concern and also on a 
desire to save the sinner. In an utterly 
abnormal situation, when the sinner has ab- 
solutely rejected God, the law of holiness 
is expressed in moral concern alone. The 
basis of the moral law is the law of holiness 
— the organic law of God's existence — lifted 
into his consciousness and personalized. 
Righteousness has its source in the nature of 
God, but becomes a living thing by his per- 
sonally filling it with the constant power of 
his own decision. Moral government is God 
dealing with creatures according to this 
fundamental law of his own being person- 
alized. The end of the moral government 
is that the universe, through and through, 
may express and manifest what God is. 
Creation was a preparation for this goal. 
238 



THE ATONEMENT 

History is the movement toward it in spite 
of sin. Penalty is punishment which so ex- 
presses the hoHness of God as to secure 
actual movement toward the final goal of 
moral government. The Christian view re- 
gards physical death in the human race as an 
abnormal event caused by sin. The body 
is the basis of racial contact and experience. 
God wanted the race forever to express 
moral love: in sin it refuses; in death he 
breaks the racial connection and thrusts men 
out alone. It is the awful accentuation in 
punishment of the very selfishness which 
refused to conform to the plan of God. 
Coming more directly to the work of our 
Lord, Professor Curtis discusses the teach- 
ing of Saint Paul because he "furnishes the 
more important data, and no further bibli- 
cal study would essentially change the out- 
come." We may summarize the result of 
this discussion. In his bodily death our 
Saviour bore the historic penalty for sin, 
and so satisfied the holiness of God by fully 
expressing it. Thus he rendered justifica- 
tion ethically possible, on the condition of 
faith. By his resurrection our Lord came 
239 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

to the position where justification was prac- 
tica^lly possible, he forming one by one the 
new community. In his glorified body he 
is the type to which the saints are to be con- 
formed. Thus in every way he is the center 
of the new race. A chapter on our Lord's 
strange hesitation in approaching death 
shows that the deepest tragedy of the Pas- 
sion was that expressed in the words, "Why 
hast thou forsaken me?" This w^as the cup 
he dreaded to empty. 

Now, we are ready for the constructive 
work of the theory. The purpose of God 
in redemption was the same as in creation — 
"to obtain a race of holy persons." Now, 
however, it was to do it in spite of sin. The 
old race was doomed to destruction because 
of sin, and was in process of dissolution. 
Jesus Christ came to be the dynamic center 
of the new race. By the incarnation he be- 
came the race-man. His whole experience 
had this end in view. His "exhaustive human 
experience perfects his racial efficiency." 
Before he can secure the new race Jesus 
Christ must make an atonement for sin. 
This is not a relative necessity, it is an abso- 
240 



THE ATONEMENT 

lute necessity. It springs out of the very- 
nature of God. The hohness of God must 
be satisfied by a full and perfect expression 
of it. And we may be sure the awful way 
chosen was the only way, for had there been 
a method of less terrible and tragic cost, God 
would have chosen it. In the bodily death of 
men God's nature had been partly expressed. 
It did not say, "I love men." It just said, 
"I hate sin." In establishing a new race the 
holiness of God must be as fully expressed 
in moral concern as it was by the destruction 
of the old race. In his death Christ bore 
the exact penalty for sin. Personally he 
was not punished. As race-man he was 
punished. "It was official representative 
suffering." As race-man he stood right in 
the place of the sinner and bore the penalty 
of sin. "He was broken from the Adamic 
race, like any other sinner." But, deeper 
than this, he entered into the very spiritual 
meaning of sin's punishment: he lost the 
consciousness of his Father's presence. "In 
the beginning of the isolation of his death as 
racial mediator (he) met the whole shock 
of the wrath of God against sin." "His 
241 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

death had in its experience the extreme 
ethical content of personal isolation." "There 
alone our Lord opens his mind, his heart, 
his personal consciousness to the whole in- 
flow of the horror of sin — the endless history 
of it; from the first choice of selfishness on, 
on to the eternity of hell ; the boundless ocean 
of its isolation and desolation he allows, wave 
on wave, to overwhelm his soul." Thus in 
his physical death, and his spiritual experi- 
ence in it, our Lord bore the very penalty 
of sin. In doing this he completely ex- 
pressed the holiness of God. "He did it more 
perfectly than it could have been done by the 
annihilation of a whole race of sinners." 
But Calvary is a creative thing. It makes 
possible movement toward the very goal of 
God — the salvation of the race as a race — 
and this potency completes its power to 
satisfy completely the eternal God. Thus 
Calvary, the deed of the race-man bearing 
the penalty of sin, and so expressing God's 
hatred of sin as to render the foundation and 
gradual formation of the new race possible, 
is the atonement. When our Saviour rose 
again the "racial center of organism became 
242 



THE ATONEMENT 

a finished fact." His ascension and session 
are features in the historic reahzation of his 
mediatorial work in connection with the new 
race. Thus there is a great series of re- 
demptive deeds — the Incarnation, which 
secures the race-man; the Death of Christ, 
in which the atonement is consummated ; the 
Resurrection, by which our Lord founds the 
new race ; the Ascension, when he is inducted 
into the office of mediator; and the Session, 
in which his mediatorial work is carried on. 
With all this, however, God can forgive the 
sinner only on condition of the most unflinch- 
ing ethical procedure on his part. There is 
no moral let-up. But this sinner is not saved 
by the moral quality of his accepting Christ. 
This is merely a condition. The salvation is 
a thing wrought by Jesus, not a thing 
achieved by the sinner. A drowning sailor 
must hold to the rope let down to save him, 
but he does not save himself. The Christian 
peace is secured in the fact that his whole 
growth is growth in Christ. Every man in 
the new race finds completion in the brother- 
hood and in Christ. The brotherhood is to 
be a great organism of service alive with 
243 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

moral love and joy. This brotherhood — 
rendered possible by the death of Christ — 
will at last victoriously realize God's original 
design in creation. And with all this the 
holy God is satisfied. 

Some things about this theory will strike 
us at once : 

1. It grows out of genuine Christian ex- 
perience, and expresses it. It catches the 
very feelings of the Christian who has found 
peace with God through Jesus Christ. Its 
emphasis on the awfulness of sin could 
scarcely be prof ounder, and it has the feeling 
about sin of a man who rejoices in the great- 
ness of the Christian salvation. 

2. It is rooted in vitality. Its psychology 
is so keen, yet so sensitive to spiritual mean- 
ings, its solution of the problem so deeply 
related to the very demands of earnest life, 
that there is a practical seizure. 

3. It not only expresses the social hunger 
of our time, it ennobles it. The great things 
of men's hunger for brotherhood are ac- 
cepted and transfigured in the glow of a 
heavenly light. 

4. Here, where there has been so much 

244 



THE ATONEMENT 

ethical makeshift we find none. It is all 
honest and candid. 

5. The substitution of God's holiness, as 
the thing to be satisfied, for the one quality 
of justice, takes away from this theory the 
greatest difficulties which beset the Satisfac- 
tion Theory. 

6. The whole content of theology is 
focused on the work of our Lord. Its 
deepest place relates to what God is. Its 
power would be lost if Christ were not God, 
if there were not a real Trinity of real per- 
sons, if our Lord had not lived a sinless life. 
The resurrection is lifted into redemptional 
significance. The theological truths appear 
not as fragments, but as part of a great 
organism. It is saying much of a theory of 
the atonement that it relates itself to the 
other truths of theolog}^ in this organic way. 

7. The theory speaks in the language of 
our time. It has listened to the time-spirit, 
but it does not surrender Christianity: it 
interprets it. 

Still, under the glow of this piece of con- 
structive work, it would be unwise to at- 
tempt to utter a final criticism. Time will 
245 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

answer questions as to its ultimate place 
among offered solutions of the problem and 
the question its vitality makes inevitable: 
"May not we here have found a method 
which strikes the keynote of the final 
theory?" Of this, at least, we ma}^ be sure: 
the very life blood of the great old theories 
throbs here, and the joining is not mechan- 
ical. The new features and the method of 
articulation give us a view which is organic. 



246 



THE THEOLOGY OF ALBRECHT 
RITSCHL 



CHAPTER IX 

THE THEOLOGY OF ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

To a man who is interested in the thought- 
movements of our time and the relation of 
Christianity to them, the study of the 
theology of Ritschl is sure to be of interest. 
He will feel that he is studying something 
which is alive. It is not a worn-out system in 
whose channels men's minds move with diffi- 
culty and to whose deeper meanings their 
hearts do not respond, but a system grow- 
ing out of the very heart of our modern 
thought life, and one whose attractiveness 
and vitality have been felt by multitudes. 

In this study the plan will be, first, to get 
a glimpse of the man and the movement in 
quite external features; then to endeavor to 
see the outstanding features of the thought 
world in which the system was born. Fol- 
lowing this, we shall try to see what Ritschl's 
standpoint was, and then make a brief state- 
ment of his system as we understand it. 
Coming to the atonement, we shall try to 
249 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

see Ritschl's view in relation to his general 
principles and its place in relation to the 
great historic theories, with some apprecia- 
tion and criticism of his view. Then, in 
conclusion, we shall have something to say 
of the service of Ritschlianism, and in 
criticism of its inadequacies. 

First, then, the man and the movement. 
Albrecht Ritschl was born in Berlin in 1822. 
His father was a bishop and general super- 
intendent of the Evangelical Chmxh in 
Pomerania. In 1827 Ritschl's father moved 
to Stellen, which thus became the home of 
his childhood. When the time came for 
Ritschl to enter university, Bonn was chosen, 
as we are told, on account of Nitzsch. It 
is an interesting fact that Nitzsch was a 
theologian who believed in the agreement of 
the evangelical theology and science and 
sought to show this agreement. Thus 
Ritschl's first theological environment in a 
university was that from which his whole 
system, as we shall see, was a revolt. It is 
also worth noting that Bonn has a double 
faculty — Catholic and Protestant. Ritschl 
went to Bonn in 1839, and in 1841 we find 
250 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

him at Halle. Here he was under Tholuck 
and Julius Miiller. But the Hegelian phi- 
losophy was represented by such men as 
Professor Erdmann, and now Ritschl came 
under the influence of Hegelianism, and 
after a time we see him in the position 
of a Hegelian himself. The great Hegelian 
theologian, Baur, was in Tubingen, and to 
Tiibingen Ritschl went. But Ritschl could 
not content himself in the Hegelian ranks, 
and by 1856 we find that he has completely 
broken with them. The influence of this 
Hegelian period remained with Ritschl, 
however, and traces of it may be seen as in 
his desire for a "whole" view of Christianity. 
Through his own study Ritschl came under 
the influence of Kant, and later became 
personally acquainted with Lotze, whose 
views influenced his own. Likewise in study 
Ritschl came up against Schleiermacher, 
who influenced him profoundly. 

Ritschl was a teacher in Bonn for eighteen 
years. We are told that "he began his first 
semester with eight hearers in each of his 
two courses, but the next semester he got 
only three in one and two in the other. Three 
251 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

years later he passed the whole winter 
semester without lecturing at all, since no 
one had taken the courses offered." But in 
his last years at Bonn he was exceedingly 
popular. It will interest us to notice the 
fields he covered in his teaching. He first 
took the New Testament, then he took up 
church history, then history of doctrine, and 
after he had been at Bonn seven years began 
lecturing on dogmatics. After twelve years 
he took up the subject of theological ethics, 
and after sixteen years the subject of the 
biblical theology of the New Testament. 
We see that it was a wide field which Ritschl 
himself covered. His last years were spent 
as professor at the University of Gottingen, 
and this period was a time of great popu- 
larity. His earlier work on The Old Catholic 
Church is interesting in its relation to his 
rupture with the Tiibingen school. His 
great work was his Justification and Recon- 
ciliation. The three volumes consist of 
(1) A History of Doctrine, (2) A Bibhcal 
Theology, and (3) the positive statement 
of his own system. The first volume was 
pubhshed in 1870, the second and third in 
252 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

1874. His last work was a History of 
Pietism which engaged him ten or eleven 
years. Ritschl died in his study March 20, 
1889, aged sixty-seven years. 

It has been declared that Ritschl touched 
almost every phase of theological thought 
in Germany, and what has already been said 
of his preparation almost answers our second 
question, What was the thought- world in 
which his system was born? This may be 
answered briefly by saying, On the philo- 
sophic side, the world of Kant and Hegel; 
on the theological side of the world of 
Schleiermacher; and over against positive 
Christianity the world of Strauss ; the world 
in which Kant's critique of the possibilities of 
speculative thought and his exaltation of the 
practical reason had been heard; the v/orld 
in which Hegel's philosophy of the "abso- 
lute" had been received with open arms; 
the world in which the rationalism of Semler 
and Strauss had been felt; and the positive 
impetus of Schleiermacher, with his insist- 
ence upon the value of the subjective and 
man's direct communication with God. This 
was the world in which Ritschlianism was 
253 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

born. And the aim of Ritschlianism is to 
give a more adequate view of Christianity 
than had been given elsewhere. 

Now we must try to see what was 
RitschFs standpoint in his work. On the 
rehgious side his position was anti-mystical. 
He did not believe in direct communication 
between the soul and God. Dr. Garvie, in 
his interpretation of Ritschl, tries to qualify 
this statement, but at best it cannot be made 
out that Ritschl held to a positive notion of 
direct communication between the soul and 
God. When Ritschl read Schleiermacher we 
are told that he was both repelled and at- 
tracted, and we may readily conclude that 
the thing that repelled him was Schleier- 
macher's mysticism, while his subjectivity 
attracted him. 

Then, following Kant, Ritschl came to 
the conclusion that along the lines of theo- 
retic thought you cannot do much for reli- 
gion, while Kant's "Practical Reason" sug- 
gested a way to do something for religion. 
Ritschl made the distinction a sharp one. 
To him there were two worlds : the world of 
theoretic thought and the world of religious 
254 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

truth, and these two do not touch, Ritschl 
would never have us attempt to harmonize 
Christianity with a theory of things. Reh- 
gious knowledge and scientific knowledge 
are distinct and their spheres are distinct. 

Religious knowledge is based upon what 
Ritschl called independent value judgments, 
or judgments of worth. In other words, the 
basis of accepting Christianity is its worth in 
satisfying our religious needs, and we are to 
be quite content with this and not to seek for 
it an objective validity by moving along the 
lines of ordinary theoretic thought. Ritschl 
discards speculative theism. He condemns 
ecclesiastical dogma for having mixed itself 
with metaphysical notions, for he believed 
that Christianity had suffered from being 
mixed with philosophy, that very early it 
began to accommodate itself to Greek 
thought — in Harnack all this is expressed 
clearly — and that it has suffered from its 
connections all through the centuries. To 
get back to Christianity before this un- 
fortunate alliance is Ritschl' s endeavor. 

But Ritschl's rejection of metaphysics is 
by no means such a wholesale thing as at 
255 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

first sight it may seem. For he must pro- 
ceed according to a theory of knowledge, 
and he must recognize the vahdity of logical 
procedure. Ritschl himself was perfectly 
conscious that he could not lock metaphysics 
out of the door, and he is quoted as saying 
that, after all, it is not a question of having 
metaphysics, but what metaphj^sics you have. 
And it is important to recognize that it was 
on the basis of a particular philosophic view 
that Ritschl made the distinction between 
religious and philosophic knowledge. And 
perhaps he was far more influenced by his 
own philosophical presuppositions than he 
himself recognized. 

Now we come to Professor RitschFs sys- 
tem of doctrine. And probably it would not 
be putting it too strongty to say that he was 
by nature a systematic theologian. 

First, it is worthj^ of note that in Ritschl's 
view the systematic theologian must do his 
work from within the Christian community. 
And his conception of the sj^stematic theolo- 
gian is that he is to give an articulated view 
of the whole of the Christian faith. 

Beginning the survey of liis system then, 
256 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

we come to his conception of God, Accord- 
ing to Ritschl, the Christian conception of 
God is that "given in the revelation received 
through Christ" and this conception is that 
of a loving will. All that we know of God 
we can sum up in the word "love." By a 
metaphysical excursion Ritschl argues for 
the personality of God. He conceives of 
God's love as his steadfast holding to his 
purpose of a kingdom among men. In his 
notion of God we miss a great insistence on 
God's righteousness, and when we come to 
God's relations to men his personahty seems 
in time somehow chained and hfeless. 

The World, Again taking a plunge into 
the forbidden realm of metaphysics, Ritschl 
deduces the world from the love of God. 
He conceives of it as being called into ex- 
istence and governed to secure the end of 
God, which is the establislmient of a king- 
dom among men. This is the end of his 
love. JMen exist in the world as a means 
to the kingdom. 

Sin. But such a kingdom as God wants 
in the world does not exist, and, summing 
up all that is contradictory to the kingdom 
257 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of God, we may call it the kingdom of sin. 
Ritschl puts no emphasis on the fall, and 
rejects the idea of original sin. In relation 
to the individual he conceives of two kinds 
of sin : the final direction of the will in oppo- 
sition to God, which he thinks cannot be 
forgiven, and all other sin, which he classes 
as ignorance, and which can be forgiven. 
Sin is the opposite of the kingdom of God, 
and opposition to God's will. The concep- 
tions of sin as a violation of the moral law 
and of one's own standards of righteousness 
are not emphasized. 

Guilt, Men have a consciousness of guilt 
which leads them to distrust God. Those 
things in life have the significance of 
punishments which the consciousness of 
guilt leads men to impute to themselves as 
punishments. This consciousness of guilt 
as distrust and guilt itself shut men out from 
fellowship with God, and it is evident that 
whatever shuts men out from fellowship 
with God needs to be removed. 

Religion. Ritschl has a peculiar view of 
religion. JNIen find themselves in the world 
with a feeling that they are of greater value 
258 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

than the world, yet feehng that they are a 
part of it. And in men there is a desire to 
master the world. This leads to religion. 
Religion is the expression of men's need of 
world mastery. Christianity secures to men 
this mastery, this lordship over the world. 

Christ, Coming now to Christianity, we 
find that it centers in the historic person of 
Christ. Ritschl puts aside all such ques- 
tions as the incarnation — the two natures, 
hmnan and divine — as metaphysical. He has 
no doctrine of the Trinity, and despite Dr. 
Garvie's argmnent I am not sure that it 
would be doing Ritschl an injustice to say 
that in his notion Christ's preexistence was 
ideal. And it is difficult to make out from 
Ritschl how the Saviom-'s postexistence has 
any direct relation to the conmimiity 
foimded by him. To Ritsclil the di^Tuity of 
C Insist consists in the worth of Christ to 
men; as some one has put it, "God could 
not do for us more than Christ has done." 
So he has the value of God for us. 

When we look at Christ the first tiling 
that impresses us is his spiritual lordsliip 
over the world. In his patience in suffering 
259 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

and his trueness to his vocation (the found- 
ing of the kingdom of God) even unto 
death, there is a kinghness. In the loving 
motive he had, and the continual estimate 
of himself as Lord over the world, in con- 
formity of this to the will of God, he is 
God's revealer, and is equal to God. Jesus 
Christ made God's end his end. To the 
man who comes to him with a sense of guilt, 
and a distrust of God on account of this, 
Jesus reveals God's love and thus takes away 
the distrust. 

Justification, This removing of the ob- 
stacle to fellowship with God is justification. 
Jesus Christ by his own Lordship over 
the world through making God's end his 
end, shows man the way to lordship over the 
world. Thus his religious need is met. Our 
Lord is able to lead men to this freedom 
because he had it first. He had the relation 
of fellowship with God and leads men into it. 
The experience which he possessed he shares 
with men. In this sense he is their Priest. 

The Community, But God is not after 
saved men but a community. In fact, ac- 
cording to Ritschl, it is only by means of 
260 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

the community that the man becomes par- 
taker in justification. The community 
rather than the individual is the subject of 
justification. A man enters the community 
by trusting God and accepting God's end 
as his end. 

The Church, The community regarded 
as worshiping is the church; as bound to- 
gether and acting on the basis of unselfish 
love, it is the kingdom of God. Of this 
kingdom Christ is the founder, and to it he 
stands as God. We get back to Christ 
through his self-testimony and the testimony 
of the disciples about him. But to Ritschl 
there was no such authority to the point of 
view of authorsT in the New Testament as 
would keep him from disagreeing with them 
if he chose. The community of Christians 
enjoy religious freedom from the world. 
By the exercise of patience, humility, and 
prayer — prayer being principally thanks- 
giving and the expression of patience and 
humility — the members of the community 
exercise lordship over the world. They feel 
that no obstacle the world can offer can 
divert them from their end — the kingdom 
261 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

of God — and so exercise lordship over the 
world. Along this way the Christian finds 
his perfection — a perfection in relation to 
his vocation, not an absolute one — in reli- 
gious freedom and moral activity, in his 
motives perfected. Moral activity in the 
kingdom of God comes as a sort of con- 
comitant of religious freedom. Professor 
Ritschl never succeeded in showing in a very 
satisfactory way the relation between reli- 
gious freedom and moral activity. 

Assurance, Personal assurance, of course, 
does not come according to Ritschl as a 
direct communication from God. His anti- 
mystical tendencies prevented his holdmg 
such a position as that. Assurance, he 
thinks, comes in one's exercise of patience, 
humility, and prayer, as the functions of 
religious freedom. 

The Holy Spirit, Ritschl's notion of the 
Holy Spirit is that the Spirit is God's 
knowledge of his own end. As said before, 
Ritschl has no answer to questions about the 
Trinity. These are metaphysical. He gives 
one eschatological hint — the annihilation of 
the finally perverse. 

262 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

The Atonement, In the outline of 
Ritschl's system we have stated the essence 
of his view of the work of our Lord, which, 
as we have seen, occupies a very important 
place. Now we want to view it more defi- 
nitely. Jesus Christ has a peculiar relation 
to the Christian commmiity as founder of 
the kingdom of God. Here we find his 
kingly office. Jesus Christ has a pecuHar 
relation to the Christian community as 
revealer of God: showing men the love of 
God, so that their distrust of God is taken 
away, and showing them God's end in the 
world, his kingdom, which they are to make 
their end also. This is his prophetic office. 
Jesus Christ maintained his o^vn fellowship 
with God, which is the basis of the relation 
into which he is to introduce believers. All 
through his hfe, even unto death, he had to 
maintain this relation himself in order to 
introduce behevers into it. This is his 
priestly office. 

On man's part the necessity is that he 

make God's end in the world his end. This 

is reconciliation. ]\Ian now enters upon a 

new relation of trust in God and comes to 

263 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

the blessedness of lordship over the world, 
and being one with the community bound 
together by love. Lordship over the world 
Ritschl calls eternal life. The significance 
of the death of Christ to Ritschl is that it 
represents the final proof of our Lord's 
loyalty to his vocation, that is, the founding 
of the kingdom of God. 

All that man gains through Christianity 
is directly related to the personal work of the 
Saviour. His distrust in God is removed 
by the revelation he gets in Jesus Christ. 
The life of lordship over and freedom from 
the world he first sees in Jesus Christ, who 
shows him the way to it. His patience, his 
humility, his prayer, his trust in God all 
come from him. The new relation to God, 
the new relation to the world, the member- 
ship in the kingdom of God all come through 
Jesus Christ. 

From the evangelical standpoint one is 
almost tempted to say that Ritschl has no 
theory of the atonement, for to him sin 
makes no such obstacle between man and 
God as makes an atonement in this sense 
necessary. But in the sense that the life 
264 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

and work of our Lord are the basis of men's 
being admitted to the Christian commmiity, 
and enjoying its privileges, we may call his 
a theory of the atonement. 

Now, what are its connections with the 
historic theories? With the Governmental 
none. Ritschl thinks of God never as a 
ruler, but as a Father. The theory is not a 
Satisfaction Theor3^ With Ritschl's general 
view there would be no place for the pecul- 
iarities of the Satisfaction Theory. The 
Saviour bears no penalty for us in Ritschl's 
mind. In one point, however, there is a 
connection with the Satisfaction Theory. 
Ritschl tries to utilize the idea of Christ's 
being our representative, and brings out the 
thought of God's imputing to the commu- 
nity the position Christ has in it. But I can- 
not see that this idea is connected in any 
very organic way with his view as a whole. 
We must classify his theory as a form of 
the Moral Influence Theory. The great 
thing about the work of our Lord is that it 
reveals God. When man sees what God is 
like his distrust is taken away. 

Now, this emphasis upon Christ as the 
265 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

revealer of God is a valuable thing and 
worthy of our appreciation. The emphasis 
upon the person of Christ and the spirit of 
his life is a valuable thing. But when we 
look frankly at the theor}^ we see that it is 
not even the greatest kind of a Moral Influ- 
ence Theory. One never feels the awful 
movement of sacrifice in the Eternal God 
which is a part of a Moral Influence Theory 
which has a positive relation to the deity of 
our Lord. One misses the emphasis upon 
the power of our Lord's work to win men 
from sin which is a part of a Moral Influence 
Theory which is related to a profound con- 
ception of sin. 

Criticizing the theory in larger relations: 
There is not the biblical emphasis upon the 
death of our Lord. There is no conception 
of sin as making an obstacle in God, no 
emphasis corresponding to the biblical notion 
of God's relation to sin, or to a man's own 
sense of sin when his conscience is fully 
awake. There is no adequate account taken 
of the fact that God must uphold all moral 
concern. His theory, then, we must char- 
acterize as thoroughly inadequate, measured 
266 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

by the Bible and by the deepest feehngs of 
a man's own heart. 

Now, viewing the system as a whole, can 
we say that it has rendered service to 
theological thought? In reply, we must 
recognize that, in the first place, its emphasis 
upon value judgments has been of service. 
We need to see clearly that the great apolo- 
getic of Christianity is the very fact upon 
which Ritschl insisted — that it satisfies 
man's religious needs, and a man's deepest 
reason for accepting it is that it has the 
worth of a satisfying thing to him. But 
when Ritschl refuses to allow that a thing 
necessary for our religious satisfaction shall 
clearly have objective validity, we must part 
with him. When he sees no connection be- 
tween religious truth and scientific truth, we 
must part with him. It has well been said 
that a religious truth without objective 
reality is not a real truth, and religion itself 
is reduced to subjectivity if we are not 
allowed to relate it to truth in other realms. 
What is true in one realm cannot be false 
in another. Christianity satisfies the man, 
therefore he accepts it. And because it 
267 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

satisfies him in the needs of his personal Hfe 
he is not afraid to see it related to all life. 
He knows that it must stand. 

From the Ritschlian movement perhaps 
there will come a sense of the truths of the 
faith quite apart from their philosophical 
setting, and that it is these truths which are 
vital and not the particular philosophical 
system with which we try to relate them. 
This will be a good thing. But it must never 
be taken to mean a divorce between religion 
and every philosophical view of the world. 
Another service of the Ritschlian movement 
has been the emphasis it has placed upon 
the historic Christ. This cannot help having 
a freshening influence upon the religious life 
of all who feel it. Then the lifting up of the 
idea of the kingdom of God — the community 
bound together by love — is a service we 
ought to recognize. It should be made and 
kept a great thought in the mind of the 
Church. 

When we come to speak in conclusion of 
the inadequacies of the system, we find that 
they are manj^ In the first place, as Pro- 
fessor Orr points out, while ruling out a 
268 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

theory of things from being related to his 
system, he allows his own philosophical 
theory to do strange and wonderful things. 
Taking it as a basis, he rules out the con- 
sideration of the Trinity, leaves his system, 
to say the least, without a clear notion of the 
preexistence of Christ — or the proper place 
being given to miracles — and takes away 
from Christianity things which have been 
considered essential, and which we beheve 
are essential, not with the excuse that in 
"going back to Christ" and the primitive 
records he finds full warrant for it, but be- 
cause his philosophical theory demands it. 
No wonder if such procedure suggests the 
thought that if you shut metaphysics out 
of the front door it will come in at the back 
door. And, more than this, Ritschl is not 
prevented from dealing with such subjects 
as the personality of God, for all his dislike 
of metaphysics. Philosophically, he has 
done two things which seem to me unjusti- 
fiable in a Christian theologian: he has 
attempted to divorce the realm of religious 
truth from that of scientific truth, and he 
has allowed philosophical positions which 
269 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

have commended themselves to hun to lead 
him to discard cardinal Christian doctrines. 

The Christian thinker may come to times 
when he cannot harmonize some philosophic 
position and some Christian fact, but he 
must always insist that finally when the true 
philosophy has come, and Christian doc- 
trines are finally understood, there will be 
perfect harmony, and this must be the end 
toward which he is always working. In the 
meantime he must be looking for a philoso- 
phy large enough to explain his Christianity, 
and not paring his Christianity down to fit 
into his philosophy. 

We have already suggested that Ritschl's 
attitude toward sin is not that of the Bible. 
Now our attention needs to be called to the 
fact that it is difficult to reconcile his own 
positions at this point. To him such sin as 
may be forgiven is conceived of as ignorance. 
Yet one of the things the work of our Lord 
does is to show a man how to get rid of his 
sense of guilt. Now, here is rather an 
anomaly — a man having a sense of guilt for 
sins he does not know he has committed. 
Psychologically, we believe Ritschl's notion 
270 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

of sin to be thoroughly inadequate. Then 
he has missed the Bible emphasis about the 
resurrection of our Lord. To this day it is 
a question upon which there is disagree- 
ment, as to whether Ritschl believed in the 
actual resurrection. Anyone who reads the 
New Testament will not find any such 
doubtful attitude there. Then there is in 
Ritschl a tendency to try to account for as 
much of the whole thing as he can, inside a 
man, which is rationalistic. He seems to 
shrink from gripping what is quite outside 
of human life, and this shrinking means that 
rationalism had a greater hold on him than 
he knew. 

Perhaps one can sum up that in which 
Ritschl's system fails by saying that it is a 
surrender to the Zeitgeist and not a chal- 
lenge to it. The spirit of the times says, 
"Surrender the Trinity," and he surrenders 
it. The spirit of the times says, "Surrender 
the personality of the Holy Spirit," and he 
does it. The spirit of the times says, "Sur- 
render the actual preexistence of Christ, 
the miracles, and the resurrection," and 
Ritschl puts no emphasis on these facts. The 
271 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

spirit of the times says, *' Surrender the 
thought of the awfulness of sin," and Ritschl 
transposes sin into ignorance. 

But the attitude of the Christian thinker 
must be not of surrender, it must be one of 
challenge. Taking the facts which have been 
the basis of that satisfaction of the church 
through the centuries, he must build his 
fortification and summon the modern spirit 
to make the attack, confident tliat after the 
din of battle, at the setting of the sun, there 
shall have been lost not one of the great 
fundamental positions of the faith. The 
supernatural in the world on the basis of a 
living, personal, loving, holy God; the God- 
head — a Trinity, with a glowing riclmess of 
life, not a lonely only one ; the incarnation — 
real God becoming real man ; the sinless life ; 
the redemptive deed on Calvary, when He 
who laiew no sin became sin for us ; ' the 
actual resurrection — the eternal session, the 
judgment to come; the reality, awful in its 
tragedy, of sin; the meeting of the hmnan 
soul by God himself; the Spirit's personality 
and ceaseless activity among men; the Bible 
a basis for true and reliable knowledge about 



ALBRECHT RITSCHL 

redemption- — all these shall stand a fortifi- 
cation, not simply that but a range of granite 
mountains, against which assault shall beat 
in vain. The Christian theologian must 
believe that Christianity is strong enough 
to do battle and great enough to conquer. 



273 



THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE 
BOOK OF REVELATION 



CHAPTER X 

THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE BOOK OF 
REVELATION 

I. The Contents of the Book 
The book of Revelation recounts a series 
of visions, ascribed to John on Patmos, a 
small island in the JEgean, After the sec- 
tion in which we find the seven letters to the 
seven churches, the principal series of visions 
are those of the seven seals, the seven 
trumpets, and the seven bowls. Important 
episodes, such as that of the woman and the 
dragon, and the beasts fill out the structure 
of the book. 

A little closer survey of its contents will 
be of use to us. John in the Isle of Patmos 
receives the revelations which are embodied 
in the book. Letters of warning and en- 
couragement are for Ephesus, Smyrna, 
Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, 
and Laodicea. Following this, John sees 
the vision of the book no one is worthy to 
open, until the Lamb that was slain is de- 
277 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

clared worthy and opens the book after 
receiving the homage of heaven. As the 
seals are opened symbohcal horses come 
forth, one white, one red, one black, one 
pale. Then the martyr souls under the altar 
are seen. Great disturbances in nature fol- 
low the opening of the sixth seal. The seal- 
ing of Israel is described, and the opening 
of the seventh seal introduces the seven 
angels with the seven trumpets. Plagues 
follow the sounding of the first four trum- 
pets, the woe of locusts the fifth, and the 
woe of armies the sixth. Here the episodes 
of the seven thunders, the little book, and 
the measuring of Jerusalem, with the death 
and resurrection of the two witnesses, find 
place. Next comes the account of the 
woman whose son at birth is saved from the 
dragon, who is cast down to the earth. The 
episode of the beast from the sea and the 
beast from the land follows. A series of 
not very closely connected visions and utter- 
ances now occur, ending with the reaping of 
the earth. The seven angels with the seven 
bowls pour them out, part of them intro- 
ducing plagues like those of the trmnpets. 
278 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

The fall of Babylon now finds a large place. 
The marriage supper of the Lamb — then 
the chaining of the devil, and the reign of 
Christ with his martyrs and faithful ones for 
a thousand years. Finally the last opposi- 
tion, its defeat, the new heaven and new 
earth, with a description of the New Jeru- 
salem, and concluding words about the 
prophecy, and the coming of the Lord. 
Throughout the book there are interludes 
where one catches glimpses of supernal 
glory, and hears choruses of beatific song. 

11. The Problem of the Authorship 
OF THE Book 

The book of Revelation itself purports to 
be the work of John. And the testimony 
of remarkably clear external evidence is that 
this John was the one whom we know as one 
of the twelve. This testimony goes back to 
Irenasus, the disciple of Poly carp. In the 
third century we come across the suggestion 
that another John may have been the author, 
and Eusebius thought it might have been 
John the presbyter who was the author. It 
seems pretty clear that if the book comes 
279 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

from the pen of a John, it must have been 
John the apostle, as no other was well 
enough known to speak as the author does 
to the seven churches. 

The question has become complicated in 
recent years by theories of composite author- 
ship. There is a growing feeling among 
some scholars that the unity of the book is 
formal and artificial, and that there are 
traces of different points of view, of different 
historical situations, and of different authors. 
A modification of this view is one held by 
Professor Porter that one author used freely 
different apocalyptic sources. While it 
seems to me we must admit, with Professor 
Stevens, that there are problems whose solu- 
tion would be made simpler by admitting a 
diversity of authorship, I do not find the 
evidence yet sufficient to force that conclu- 
sion. 

The really serious objection to the Johan- 
nine authorship, it seems to me, is the differ- 
ence in the style emphasis of the fourth 
Gospel and the book of Revelation. That 
they have much in common one cannot 
doubt, but there are differences which, to- 
280 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

gether with other problems, make me hesitate 
to pronomice with thorough conviction for a 
Johannine authorship. We need not deal 
with this problem more closely for the pur- 
poses of this discussion. 

III. The Peoblem of the Date of the 
Book 

Jerusalem fell A. D. 70. Nero reigned 
A. D, 54-68. If the book anticipates the 
destruction of Jerusalem, it was written 
before A. D. 70. If the historical situation 
reflected is that of Nero's reign, its limits are 
more closely fixed. It does not seem to me 
that the background of the book is that of 
the reign of Nero. The persecution which 
gives the book its atmosphere is one of far 
larger dimensions than that of Nero. It 
had become evident that Rome's character- 
istic attitude was opposition to Christianity. 
This, as has been pointed out by Professor 
Ramsay, was not true in the time of Nero. 
And I do not think the interpretation of the 
symbols of the book requires his reign as a 
background. That chapter eleven does 
seem at first sight to anticipate the destruc- 
281 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

tion of Jerusalem is true. This chapter is 
one which would fit into the theory of com- 
posite authorship particularly well. On the 
other hand, if it be taken as entirely s^tq- 
bolic, the difficulty is removed. 

The reign of Domitian, 81-96, when a 
great and terrible persecution was raging, 
when Rome had become the great opponent 
of the church, is the most natural and likely 
backgromid for the book as a whole. 

IV. The Book of Re\t^lation and 
Other Apocalyptic Literature 

Before the book of Revelation was written 
there was a great output of apocalyptic 
literature. The book of Daniel in the Old 
Testament is an example. Certain common 
characteristics of canonical and non-canon- 
ical apocalypses are noteworthy. They are 
the outcome of an age of persecution; they 
speak in language of highly wrought 
imagery, full of mystery and in a form less 
noble than that of prophecy; they foresee 
judgment, and the victory of the persecuted. 

There has been a tendency to closely 
relate Revelation to other apocalypses in 
282 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

recent criticism. Regarding this there are 
three things to be said: (1) Revelation is a 
book of a class. It does not belong by many 
kinships to apocalypses written before. ( 2 ) 
It escapes in a wonderful way the extrava- 
gances of the non-canonical apocalypses, 
and is as impressive by its differences from 
them as its likeness to them. (3) In regard 
to material used from non-canonical sources, 
the great question is not. Where did it come 
from? but What is it worth? not, Was it 
used before? but Does God here seal it as a 
part of his revelation to men? 

V. The Problem of the Interpretation 
or the Book 

Perhaps no problem of the kind which 
the church has had to meet has touched in 
perplexity the problem of the interpreta- 
tion of the book of Revelation. The attitude 
of the church at large has probably almost 
always been that in some hidden way the 
book contained a history of the church in 
relation to the world, and the final consum- 
mation. Here the exegesis of jugglery has 
run riot, and almost every important char- 
283 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

acter of history has been given a place in 
the book by some fanciful interpreter. The 
method is its own condemnation. Its results 
are confusion worse confounded. A method 
which results in the apotheosis of exegetical 
insanity can never be a true one. 

Men whose judgment has revolted from 
this view, but who have reverence for the 
supposed mystical meaning hidden in the 
book, have cut the Gordian knot by declar- 
ing that it refers to the future. It is a mes- 
sage to the church to come in the final times. 
They will find themselves in difficulty in 
explaining the fact that it w^as clearly ad- 
dressed to men who were alive when it was 
written, the author's consciousness of having 
a message to his own time, and in explaining 
why God gave a message to his final church 
millennium too soon, and left it as a per- 
petual bewilderment to those who came be- 
fore — a method contrary to all we know of 
God's ways in revealing himself to men. 

Some modern scholars have taken the 

opposite view. All the book grew out of the 

time of its authorship and had reference only 

to that period. A close study of the material 

284 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

of the book, with the principle of the time- 
lessness of prophecy in mind, will lead, I 
believe, to the conclusion that this method, 
while bearing witness to an element of truth, 
is quite one-sided and incomplete. 

Another method which has been pro- 
pounded with enthusiasm is to consider the 
book a splendid expression regarding insti- 
tutions and principles, not treating of facts 
or incidents. That this view has a bearing 
upon the significance of the book we need 
not dispute, but that it adequately explains 
a book whose center was an historical situa- 
tion, whose comfort would have been all too 
small had it consisted of great generaliza- 
tions, and one which bears the marks of 
particular reference, I cannot believe. 

Before stating the method of interpreta- 
tion to be followed in this study it will be 
necessary to secure the standpoint out of 
which it comes. 

VI. What the Book Says to Christian 
Consciousness 

Every book in the Bible must vindicate 
its right to a place in the canon at the bar 

285 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

of Christian consciousness, and in case of 
perplexity as to the interpretation of a book, 
the relation it holds to that consciousness is 
sure to be a key to be used in reference to 
the securing of a proper method. 

Now, what does the book of Revelation 
say to the Christian consciousness? From 
the first we find the book permeated by the 
very atmosphere of Christian worship. It is 
filled with poetry which is the expression of 
genuine Christian emotion. It breathes the 
reverent awe and restraint which is char- 
acteristic of the thought of God at its 
highest. The Holy God who is found here 
is he than whom there is no higher. With 
regard to sin, in its final form as a state of 
deep and utter turning from God, one finds 
an emphasis terribty in earnest and unflinch- 
ingly real. In relation to Christ, we find a 
faithfulness to history and a depth of under- 
standing which is nothing less than marvel- 
ous. Nowhere is he more exalted than here 
— high as the Highest, the possessor of un- 
utterable power and glory — yet the historic 
Jesus who walked with men. Regarding 
the atonement, the adequacy of the book 
286 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

may be measured by the fifth chapter, which 
is perfectly saturated with the deepest feel- 
ing of the worth of our Lord's sacrificial 
death. The wonder, the abnormality, the 
tragedy, and the glory of the death of 
Christ, all appear in this vision of the Lamb 
that was slain. While there is an emphasis 
on works, the root of hope is that the blood 
of the Lamb has been effective, and the very 
works emphasized are those of loyalty to 
the Redeemer. 

This much shows us what an appeal the 
book makes to Christian consciousness, and 
also proves that it must have been its 
product. Only out of warm, pulsing Chris- 
tian life could such conceptions have come. 

But dealing with the book in a closer way, 
we find that it bears unmistakable marks of 
having been written as a book of consolation 
and stimulus in an age of persecution, and 
the conceptions here are such as to fill it 
with power for every persecuted Christian 
in every age. With what blackness of dark- 
ness the clouds of evil cover the sky! The 
very essence of evil, at its zenith of power, 
pours forth its terrors. There is no easing 
287 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

of the problem to make the solution easy. 
Hell's masterpiece of evil in history appears, 
and in the midst of all the book absolutely 
glows with a glory of hope. Let the world 
do its worst, the righteous shall yet triumph. 
The light of a hope strong with a fervor of 
confidence that never wavers, a hope clothed 
with immortal youth and power, plays over 
the pages of the book and into the heart of 
the reader. 

Dominant evil to be utterly overthrown. 
Righteousness persecuted unto death, for- 
ever triumphant. All this because God is 
God and Christ is Christ. This is the mes- 
sage of the book of Revelation. This it said 
to the Christians of the first centmy, and 
this it has said to the persecuted in every 
age since. 

VII. Standpoint in Interpretation 

Now, we ought to be able to find a clear 
and safe point of departure for the interpre- 
tation of the book. It said this word of hope 
to the sufferers of the first century. It 
spoke to the depth of the Christian con- 
sciousness from the same depth, "deep call- 
288 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

ing unto deep." This and what flow from it 
is the vital part of the book, and nothing 
else is vital. The kaleidoscopic sjanbolism 
of the book is an attempt to suggest the in- 
expressible. The glowing hope in God, and 
His Christ, leaps over the barriers and 
limitations of speech, and pours itself out 
in imagery — sometimes characterized by 
incongruity — always only a hint, yet a 
splendid and ever valuable monument to the 
confidence, the trust, the perfect glow of 
hope that inspired it. But the symbolism 
is alwpys to be interpreted as the outpouring 
in varied form of a God-inspired faith, not 
as a mysterious detail map of the future. 
The book of Revelation is not an alchemist's 
book of magic, but, as it has well been called, 
"An Epic of the Christian Hope." 

We can agree with the scholars who hold 
to the historical method in believing that it 
grew out of a particular historical situation 
and was primarily designed to meet it. We 
can agree with the view which finds prin- 
ciples in it, to the extent that so profoundly 
did it treat the situation in which it found 
itself that it expressed what is eternally true, 
289 



THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 

and could give hope to every following age 
as well as its own. But its author did not 
know there would be any following ages of 
world history. He was thinking of his own. 
So accurately has it dealt with the funda- 
mental opposition of good and evil that 
every new form of the age-long conflict, 
especially those characterized by great and 
terrible suffering, seems but the fulfillment 
of what it foretold. This because the awful 
opposition of the first century, though the 
author of the book did not know it, was in 
many forms to be repeated from age to age. 
Lastly, the consummation which the author 
foresaw — though he knew it not — was to be 
delayed many centuries ; and so the word of 
God's final triumph does await fulfillment, 
and will be both a message and a glad ful- 
fillment to the final church. Thus, it seems 
to me, we do justice to what is vital in the 
other theories, and have a standpoint which 
sets us free from the vagaries of Quixotic 
exegesis. 

To present an outline of the interpreta- 
tion a little more formally: In the time of 
Domitian the great persecution, which really 
290 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

made it evident that Rome itself was the 
terrible enemy of the faith, came on. In 
this time of widespread and awful calamity, 
when it seemed as if the iron heel of Rome 
must wipe out the faith, the book of Revela- 
tion appeared. It was a book with a great 
past behind it. Saturated even to the phrase- 
ology with the Old Testament, as Professor 
Harnack brilliantly says, "It was thought 
in Hebrew and written in Greek." We 
may add, that while it owed much of its 
form to the Old Testament, its outlook and 
essential message belong to the gospel. It 
carried its own vindication to the hearts of 
Christian men as God's message to them. 
To endure to the end, in hope of sure and 
eternal triumph — this was its summons. 
Perhaps a touch of added mysteriousness 
was given to it because of the dangers of this 
persecuting age. But to any Christian it 
carried its own key to its great message and 
needed no interpretation. 

It is not necessary that we should peer too 

curiously into the method of the origin of 

the message. If the author had actual 

visions, which I do not think need be dis- 

291 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

puted, we may remember that vision as 
well as a prophecy could be psychologically 
mediated; and that it is quite in harmony 
with what we know of God's methods in 
Revelation, that the inner life and the ex- 
perience of the recipient of the vision should 
have entered into and colored the vision 
itself. Into this realm we need not enter 
further. The message spoke God's word to 
the time. That was its vindication. It has 
spoken God's word to generations of Chris- 
tians since. That has given it its place in 
the canon. Not the mysteries of its symbol- 
ism but this message to Christian conscious- 
ness placed it secure in the Book of God. 

To the author of the book of Revelation 
the incarnation of all evil is the Roman 
empire. So his message of the overthrow 
of evil is a message of the fall of Rome. 
This is one great burden of the book. But 
he goes back of Rome to the Satanic power, 
the ultimate personification of evil. He too 
is to be overthrown. With this final over- 
throw and judgment comes the consumma- 
tion of all things. As it was with the 
prophets of old who caught a glowing vision 
292 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

of the future, but to whom distinctions of 
time were not revealed, so it was with this 
prophet of a later day. Each prophet had 
seen the glorious consummation just front- 
ing him or his age. So this Christian prophet 
seemed to see the great future unrolling just 
ahead. He thought all was to happen 
quickly. He was a true son of the prophets 
in this attitude. But with him, as with them, 
the consummation was farther than the seer 
dreamed. 

The hunger for revenge because of the 
persecution of the saints seen in parts of 
the book may be assigned to the awful ex- 
periences of the time. Certainly, it does not 
express a permanent element in Christian 
consciousness. The fact that ahnost no 
place is left for personal decisions in the 
future grows out of the author's conception 
that the end is at hand. He viewed the 
world in the light of a bearing already held, 
either for or against God. 

VIII. Outline of the Eschatological 
Teachings of the Book 

1. The figurative passage regarding the 
293 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

martyrs under the altar is the nearest hint 
of a conception of an intermediate state. 
That they are in a place where they are 
protected by God, but not yet come to their 
full reward, is the conception. 

The book of Revelation believes in the 
resurrection and the future life. Its central 
message of hope for those who suffer even 
unto death would disappear without that. 
Its great goal is a goal after death. That 
the Lord is to come again, and that his 
coming is to inaugurate the consummation, 
is the conviction the book would give its 
readers. Regarding the one thousand years 
reign we will speak later. It believes in a 
judgment where justice will be meted out 
to all who have Hved — to the righteous 
eternal life with God, to the wicked eternal 
suffering with the devil. I do not think an 
honest exegesis can find any basis for con- 
cluding that the thought of annihilation ever 
entered the author's mind. 

An important element in the forward look 

of the book of Revelation is that it is not 

contented with a goal for life like that of 

evolution, a goal which would bring great 

294 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

things to some future generation without 
solving the problem of those who perish on 
the way to this consummation. It is essen- 
tially a personal eschatology. All the dead 
are gathered and the consummation metes 
to each hfe its proper future. Many phi- 
losophies of history are brutal compared 
with this splendid outcome, where each 
individual life comes to its own goal of joy 
or woe. 

In chapter sixteen there is a wonderful 
negative emphasis on personality. In spite 
of all judgments, the people described here 
"repented not." The author of this book 
knew that men could so set themselves 
against God that his chastisements could not 
move them. 

The teaching regarding heaven is full of 
poetic beauty, and full also of reserve. The 
perfect city has glories which are expressed 
in a description in which earth's richest and 
rarest are called upon to suggest what can- 
not be described. The absence of death, sin, 
and sorrow, and the presence and all-suffi- 
ciency for the dwellers of the city of God 
and the Lamb, these are expressed with a 
295 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

beauty and tenderness hardly to be sur- 
passed. 

Hints full of insight regarding the great 
finality for the saints are given: "The Lamb 
that is in the midst of the throne shall be 
their shepherd, and shall guide them unto 
fountains of waters of life" (7. 17) ; "His 
servants shall serve him; and they shall see 
his face ; and his name shall be on their fore- 
heads" (22. 3, 4). Service and fellowship 
with God, and oneness with him — these are 
the final words about the final universe. 

2. Some Particular Problems in the In- 
terpretation of the Book, ( 1 ) The two wit- 
nesses of chapter two may symbolize the 
witnessing, suffering, dying, victorious spirit 
to be found in the true church. 

(2) The Beasts. The beasts of chapter 
thirteen constitute an interesting problem. 
The best solution, it seems to me, is to regard 
the Final Beast as a symbol of the Roman 
power as embodied in the office of emperor, 
and the second as some particular manifesta- 
tion of that power through some lower 
official. The healed death-stroke has been 
suggested to be the threatened convulsion 
296 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

at the time of the death of Nero. The num- 
ber six hundred and sixty-six, faUing short 
of the perfect number, may well suggest the 
realization in humanity of all that is oppo- 
site to holiness and perfection. The finding 
of Nero's name by incorrectly securing the 
numerical value of the letters of his name in 
a language not used by the author in writing 
the book, and not understood by his readers 
(cf. Professor Ramsay), is fanciful enough. 

(3) Babylon, The whole treatment of 
Babylon, the great and wonderful city, and 
its fall, it seems to me, without doubt refers 
to Rome. Professor Milligan's attempt to 
interpret it as referring to the faithless 
element in the church quite fails to secure 
vital historical contact for the passage. On 
the other hand, the situation out of which 
the book came and the language of the 
passages themselves fit in a remarkable way 
the interpretation which refers them to 
Rome. 

(4) The 1,000 Years, This passage 
occurs in the twentieth chapter of the book. 
It describes the chaining of the devil and 
the reign of Christ with his saints for a 

297 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

thousand years. It is usually interpreted to 
mean a period immediately following the 
Parousia. It has been interpreted, how- 
ever, to mean the whole Christian era from 
the first coming until the Parousia, because 
Christ in his work essentially conquered the 
devil and sin. The reconciling of this view 
with the statements of the passage about 
the saints (who had been dead) reigning 
with Christ, and the first resurrection, seems 
a task of proportions which may well lead 
us to seek shelter in some other view. It 
seems clear that, however we treat the pas- 
sage in relation to Christian doctrine, its 
meaning as it stands is that after our Lord 
comes, there will be a resurrection of his 
saints and a period of triumph for them 
with him in this world. The following loos- 
ing of the devil and final conflict are full of 
perplexity, and when one remembers that 
the whole passage in its present form repre- 
sents views unparalleled elsewhere in the 
New Testament and probably contradictory 
to other teaching, it becomes evident that 
the passage cannot be pressed for purposes 
of New Testament theology. However, it 
298 



THE BOOK Of revelation 

is safe, I think, to say, that it is a witness to 
a deep Christian intuition that Christianity 
is to have a real triumph in this world. 

IX. The Eschatology of the Apoca- 
lypse Compared with Other New 
Testament Eschatology 

The most marked divergence of the book 
of Revelation from other New Testament 
conceptions is to be found in the passage 
just discussed. Saint Paul does say that 
Christ must reign until he has put all his 
enemies under his feet (1 Cor. 15. 2.5) . But 
this is not a real parallel, for Satan is bound 
before the beginning of the one thousand 
years and loosed afterward. The two pas- 
sages have in common a victory of Christ in 
this world. Saint Paul emphasizes Christ's 
delivering up the kingdom unto the Father. 
This conception does not appear in the book 
of Revelation. The solution in all likelihood 
is that Paul's vision had complete illumina- 
tion at this point. 

In general, however, it may be said that 
there is striking agreement between the 
eschatology of the apocalypse and that of 
299 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

the rest of the New Testament. The great 
essential features of the outhne we have 
given of this eschatology of the apocalypse 
might have served as an outline of the 
eschatology of the New Testament. Indeed, 
its relation to our Lord's eschatological dis- 
course in Matthew 24 is so remarkable that 
it has been called an enlargement of that 
discourse (Milligan). 

X. The Eschatology of the Apocalypse 
AND THE Christian Theologian 

The Christian theologian may well enter 
the deepest places of this book before he 
begins to write on eschatology. There are 
great moods in the book which need to be 
his mood. The sense of the dire evil the 
church must meet in the world, of the indi- 
vidual problems whose onty solution is in 
the life beyond, he should feel. Its under- 
standing of the power of a person to set 
himself permanently against God should be 
his. The pulsing joy in the final trimiiph 
of God and the righteous should throb in his 
pages. The great sense of the eternal 
significance of the Lamb that was slain 
300 



THE BOOK OF REVELATION 

should ring clear, as he writes of the final 
universe. 

This book joins its witness with the rest 
of the New Testament to the great eschato- 
logical conceptions he is to relate to his 
system: the Parousia, the resurrection, the 
judgment, heaven, hell; and he presses close 
to first-century Christian feeling about these 
things as he reads the apocalypse. Then he 
should try to enter into fellowship with the 
subtle spiritual insight of the book. In its 
symbols he will find no hidden map of the 
future, but he will find a wealth of sugges- 
tions as to many deep things of Christian 
experience and life in them. The Chris- 
tian's hidden relation with Christ, suggested 
by the name Christ gives him, known only 
to himself — in this, and it may be in number- 
less other figures, he may find hints and 
suggestions full of meaning to the Christian 
devotion, out of which theological insight of 
a spiritual kind will come. 

And the final word of his eschatology will 
be that of this book : God exalted, righteous- 
ness triumphant, the whole universe, all, all 
imder God's sway — he King of kings, and 
301 



THE QUEST FOR WONDER 

Lord of lords. And for this the Hallelujah 
Chorus will need to sing in his own soul. 

XI. The Apocalypse and Oue Hope 

The book of Revelation stands to many 
like the sphinx with its o^^^ti unrevealed 
secret, a strange monument on the desert of 
the years, with long, dark mysten^ enshroud- 
ing it. But it need not be so. Let us come 
to it as Christians with the hunger of Chris- 
tian hearts, and it has food for us. Turning 
forever from the false esoteric view of the 
book, let us listen to its real message. Have 
we sorrow ? ^lay we some day meet persecu- 
tion ? There it stands a beacon of hope. At 
the gateway of death it draws aside the 
veil, and we behold "Jerusalem the Golden." 
Do earnest hves fail of fruition here^ It 
points with perfect hope to the fulfiUment 
beyond. And over and over it sings the song 
of our o^vn deepest Christian mood — the 
basis of our hope — the song of praise and 
everlasting devotion to the "Lamb that was 
slain." 



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